Tuesday, April 14, 2009

A stich in time saves nine....

This poor poor blog. The Gala has recently become a "biggser" deal than my daily entries. Daily art enjoyment will resume promptly on Sunday, May 17th (or perhaps after my trip to Italia the week after! :0) )
Anyhow, over the weekend I was reading Oprah Magazine and at the bottom of the page was a blip titled, "And if you've only got 5 minutes...." I thought to myself, "of course!" My page turning with Ms. Winfrey led me to a simply great web-site called The Phrase Thesaurus. The Phrase Finder is a thesaurus, but for finding phrases, not words. You start with a word, any word, and Phrase Finder will search for phrases related to that word. The phrase matches don't just contain the word, but any phrases related to the word (think search word fish, and phrase would be catch 22 or whipper snapper!) How awesome!

Unfortunately, I neglected to mention that the Phrase Thesaurus has a subscription fee, which is no fun for anyone. However, you can click on over to the Phrase Finder, and find the meanings of phrases from around the world throughout all years. I just found out that the phrase, "Cloud Nine" was defined by the US Weather Bureau in the 1950s, in which 'Cloud Nine' denotes the fluffy cumulonimbus type that are considered so attractive. Fancy that? If you're looking to incorporate the expansion of your phrase knowledge on an ongoing basis, I'd suggest signing up for A Phrase a Week e-mail service. Join over 80,000 subscribers that receive a free email once a week explaining the meaning of a popular phrase. So make "no bones about it" and sign up. You just missed the meaning of "graveyard shift" last week!