The English Coven

24/12/2020

31/10/2020

Happy Halloween!!
Halloween's roots date back to the Celtic festival of Samhain. The festival was mostly celebrated in the northern parts of the UK, some parts of Ireland and northern France. This day marked the end of summer; the 1st of November marked the beginning of the Celtic new year. They believed that on this day, October 31st, the boundary between the living world and the world of the dead became blurred. They celebrated this day with huge, sacred bonfires and offered sacrifices to their deities to ward off ghosts, while wearing costumes of animal heads and skins.

Pope Gregory III, in the 18th century, chose November 1st as a time to honour all saints. Eventually, All Saints' Day incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain and the evening before All Saints' Day came to be known as All Hallows Eve, and later, Halloween.

27/10/2020

In William Shakespeare's play As You Like It, the character Rosalind observes that Orlando, who has been running about in the woods carving her name on trees and hanging love poems on branches, "seems to have the quotidian of love upon him." The Bard's use doesn't make it clear that quotidian derives from a Latin word that means "every day." But as odd as it may seem, his use of quotidian is just a short semantic step away from the "daily" adjective sense. Some fevers occur intermittently—sometimes daily. The phrase "quotidian fever" and the noun quotidian have long been used for such recurring maladies. Poor Orlando is simply afflicted with such a "fever" of love.
Source - Merriam Webster

26/10/2020

Who needs homologate? We have any number of words that mean "to officially approve something": accredit, affirm, approbate, authorize, certify, confirm, endorse, ratify, sanction, validate, and warrant, to name a few. Homologate has mostly been kept for special occasions. The beauty of homologate is that, etymologically speaking, it's an easy word, consisting as it does of the familiar Greek roots homos, meaning "alike" or "same," and logos, meaning "word" or "speech"—in other words, it suggests saying the same thing. No argument here.
Source - Merriam Webster

25/10/2020

Verbs along with subject and object, form the crux of a sentence. As we know from our school years, verbs are any word which conveys an action. However, there is more to it than it seems. Verbs can be complex and can be deceptive. Learn more about verbs and their proper usage in this mini-course where we help you learn about proper grammar usage. Click on the link below to access the course.
https://theenglishcovenonline.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/what-we-cannot-do-without/

25/10/2020

Welcome wordies! Today we're highlighting a gentle and compassionate word - clement. Clement is an adjective meaning mild or lenient.

15/06/2020

Keep in touch with us to improve your writing skills - https://theenglishcovenonline.wordpress.com/2020/06/09/common-errors-why-grammar-is-an-issue/

15/06/2020

Make use of your spare time in this lockdown by learning proper grammar usage and improve your writing skills.

Call it a legacy of history, or the postcolonial hangover, English is one of the most widely spoken languages in India. Research shows that India has the second-highest number of English speaking p…

12/06/2020

We are a group/community offering customized services in English Literature and Communicative English to students and any interested individual seeking to improve their spoken and communicative English and strengthen their base knowledge in English Literature.
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Website link - https://theenglishcovenonline.wordpress.com/