Mark Davies is a professor at BYU that has created an online resource to help non-native English speakers use the correct synonym in daily usage. An example of a problem that non-native English speakers confront that Davies helps with is the usage of the words “evil,” “bad,” “foul” and “wicked.” These words mean essentially the same thing but are not always interchangeable. For instance, a non-native speaker might intend to say that the weather is ‘foul’ but use the word ‘evil’ because they think the words are perfect interchangeable synonyms.

I think Davies is a great contributor to society. Instead of mitching and boaning about how immigrants ought to learn to speak English, he is being an active solution. But that’s not what I want to address.

Todd Hollingshead is a writer at the Salt Lake Tribune, and he wrote an article about Davies’s new online resource. The great thing about the article is his clever use of meta-humor. When talking about the synonym selector tool he opens the article with:

Professor Mark Davies is hooked on words. Addicted.

Well, not really addicted. It’s more like fixated.

No, that’s not quite right either.

“It’s an obsession,” Davies confesses. “I can’t escape from words. It’s like a kid in a candy store.”
Yes, Davies is a word nut. A lingo jingoist. A phraseo-phile. But at least this Brigham Young University linguist is putting his diction affliction to good use.

See the entire article here.

It is refreshing to see clever, well-thunk writing in places where you least expect it, like in a newspaper.