People can be surprisingly fervent about the words they dislike (like fervent, perhaps). Throw the topic into a conversation and you’ll see what I mean?you might end up feeling as though you’d poked a hornet’s nest. In fact, according to this Visual Thesaurus post, there’s even a Facebook group called “I HATE the word MOIST!”

Why all the word fury? Well, it might be because we have no control over the words we hear. We can choose not to eat the foods we dislike, and we can refuse to put on uncomfortable clothes, but we can’t simply tune out the words other people use. Sure, we’ve all struggled through a dismal main course at a dinner party, but That’s usually over in an hour or two (and we can always avoid the Brussels sprouts lasagna by claiming we’ve got an allergy).

Words, on the other hand, surround us all day, every day, both spoken and written. And we have absolutely no way to stop the constant flow of terms like orifice and irregardless that streams from other people’s mouths.

Often, our pet word peeves have little to do with the meaning of the word itself. Take cake, for instance. For most people It’s a pleasant word, bringing forth images of frothy yellow and white concoctions. But for one commenter in that Visual Thesaurus post, the word cake should be banned because of the way it sounds—the way it gets “all bunched up in the back of the throat.”

Another disliked word? Slacks. It’s tempting to think that hard vowel sounds, like the ?k? in cake and slacks, have something to do with it, and that soft vowels and consonants are more pleasing. But that doesn’t explain why the word meal rates surprisingly high in disfavour. Which makes me wonder how that Facebook group might feel about the phrase “moist meal.”

For sheer popularity (of an infamous quality) though, the most hated word has got to be like. The poor little thing has been tossed about so carelessly, appearing so often in the strangest of places, that it seems to have lost its original positive meaning.

Still, like has its defenders, and a very interesting history that explains its migration into Valleyspeak. As this ABC News clip explains, like‘s annoying prevalence started with Jack Kerouac, got a boost in the San Fernando Valley in the 1960s, and still survives thanks to shows like The Hills.

Far more than just an annoying quirk of speech, like pulls some pretty heavy linguistic weight, taking on roles such as “quotative complementizer” and “approximative adverb.” Not bad for a four letter word.

So what’s your favourite word to hate? Pulchritude, perhaps? Or literally? Go ahead, ban it forever. And if your subjects insist on using it, well, you can always let them eat cake.

S.D. Livingston is the author of several books, including the new suspense novel Kings of Providence. Visit her website for information on her writing (and for more musings on the literary world!).

Yes, according to several experts—and not because your perfect Palmer-style cursive is going to land you a plum job. Instead, learning cursive triggers parts of the brain in ways that digital communication simply can’t match.

The benefits affect our “thinking, language and working memory–the system for temporarily storing and managing information,” according to a Wall Street Journal article. In that article, Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, notes that pressing a letter on a keyboard doesn’t activate our brains to the same degree that handwriting does.

In fact, nothing seems to quite match the physical act of forming those shapes on paper, and there are brain scans to prove it. In a study conducted at Indiana University, kids were taught their letters in one of two ways: either by simply looking at them, or by printing them by hand. After the lessons, a functional MRI scan analyzed neural activity in the kids’ brains. When shown the letters during their MRIs, the kids who had practiced printing had “far more enhanced and ‘adult-like'” neural activity than their counterparts.

Karin Harman James, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Indiana University, led the study, and she told the WSJ that “it seems there is something really important about manually manipulating and drawing out two-dimensional things we see all the time.”

It’s not just kids who benefit, either. In another study, adults who practiced printing or writing characters in a new language (or even new math symbols) had “stronger and longer-lasting recognition” of those characters when compared to the retention shown by learners who typed the characters on a keyboard.

Besides the cognitive advantages that handwriting provides, it also improves the speed and quality of written work. It might seem counterintuitive that handwriting could ever be faster than cutting and pasting on a computer. But in a 2009 study, Professor Berninger and her colleagues discovered exactly that.

In this CBC article, Berninger noted that the study tested students on their ability “to complete various writing tasks?both on a computer and by hand.”  When using a pen and paper, participants had a faster word-production rate, wrote more complete sentences, and even wrote longer essays.

So does that mean we should forget about all the benefits that come with digital learning tools, or go back to the days of ink-stained fingers? No, and in an interesting twist the Wall Street Journal notes that the practice of handwriting is getting a boost from “new software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad.”

Apps for kids encourage them to trace the shapes of letters on the screen, while more sophisticated programs can help adults relearn the cursive skills they’ve forgotten.

Indeed, technology may just offer the ideal combination of memory-enhancing tools, giving us beautiful handwriting without the need for all that scrunched-up paper in the trash can. Now if only they had a way to eliminate writer’s cramp.

S.D. Livingston is the author of several books, including the new suspense novel Kings of Providence. Visit her website for information on her writing (and for more musings on the literary world!).

Perhaps the most obvious literary tourist attraction is The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a theme park that lets Potter fans immerse themselves in a life-sized Hogsmeade. Visitors can tour the Hogwarts castle, with stops ranging from the Gryffindor common room to Dumbledore’s office. Hogsmeade streets feature real-life shops such as Ollivanders, Honeydukes, and the Three Broomsticks.

That’s all very Hollywood, but if You’re looking for something a bit more realistic, step back in time to Dickens World. Located in Kent, this “multi-sensory, interactive experience” promises to truly bring Dickensian times to life, letting you “immerse yourself in the sights, sounds and smells of nineteenth-century England.”

And when they say smells, they mean it. Not that you’ll get to throw raw sewage into the streets, a common practice in real Victorian times. However, the park features chemical “smell pots,” as this New York Times article explains. When heated, the pots “emit odors of offal and rotting cabbage.”

Fair warning, though. As the bittersweet tone of the article reveals, Dickens World might come closer than planned to conjuring Dickens’s tales, leaving visitors with a sense of disappointment to rival Miss Havisham’s.

If you prefer literary escapades of the outdoors type, try your hand at being Huck Finn for a day. Huck Finn’s Jubilee lets you climb greased poles, build a river raft, join in a frog jumping contest, and try your hand at whitewashing a fence—just like Mark Twain’s famous young adventurers did. For those who really want to get into character, the annual festival even includes a Huck Finn look-alike contest. All you need are overalls, a fishing pole, a general knowledge of Huck’s adventures, and “well-traveled bare feet.” Oh, and to be a boy, of course.

Prefer to strike out on your own? You won’t be the first to follow the trail of The Da Vinci Code, a feat many fans have attempted since the novel became a bestseller. In fact, the book’s success gave rise to countless da Vinci-themed guided tours, an unexpected boon for tourism boards.

Today, this Fodor’s blog will guide you from France to Scotland, with stops at the Ritz, the Louvre, and the Rosslyn Chapel. The blog post dates from 2005, so you should verify addresses and schedules before putting on your symbologist’s hat. One bit of advice that hasn’t changed: run if you spot an albino monk-assassin.

Of course, there’s no end to the literary tours you can create for yourself. Nearly every major writer has a cottage industry devoted to places that he (or his characters) has inhabited—from William Shakespeare’s haunts in Stratford-upon-Avon to a tour of Stockholm that includes the real-life building where the fictional Lisbeth Salander lived. You can even visit one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood homes or stay in a real-life hobbit house.

With a little imagination, there’s no telling what you’ll discover when you step through the looking glass.

S.D. Livingston is the author of several books, including the new suspense novel Kings of Providence. Visit her website for information on her writing (and for more musings on the literary world!).

One easy way you can share some bookish awesomeness is to spread the word—literally. For up-and-coming authors, bloggers, and podcasters, it can be tough to build momentum, even if they’re putting out quality content. Genuine reader reviews (sorry, grandma’s glowing praise doesn’t count) do more than help other readers. they’re also gold to folks whose advertising budgets exist in the same realm as unicorns. So if you’ve enjoyed a new author or read something useful in a blog, take five or ten minutes to post a review or comment and give some literary goodness back.

And It’s not just wordsmiths who’ve brought you this access to content. It’s also the thousands of programmers, many of them volunteers, who devote their time to things like content management and themes. WordPress software powers over 60 million sites, everything from The New York Times to Martha Stewart’s page to small blogs like my own. All free and open-source. Joomla is another free, open-source content management system.

Throw in all the free templates, add-ins, and themes created by individual programmers, and you have a remarkably generous community that helps writers and podcasters bring their content straight to you, the audience.

If you want to return some of that generosity, many theme and template creators gladly accept small donations via PayPal. Haven’t used a theme yourself? Go to your favourite blogger’s site and scroll to the bottom of the homepage. Most sites include a small credit with the name of their theme and a link to the designer’s homepage. Post a comment saying you find the theme easy to navigate, or mention something else you like about it. Better yet, give a little shout-out on Facebook or Twitter and send some new visitors to the designer’s site.

One thing many e-book fans find confusing is which books to use on which reader. Since 2006, Kovid Goyal has been making things easier with Calibre, his e-book converter and organizer. Calibre has become wildly popular, but remains free and open-source. As Kovid writes on his site, one of his main goals “has always been to prevent either the fragmentation or the monopolization of the e-book market by entities that care solely for short-term goals.”

As a reader, you can’t put a price on that sort of check to the system of corporate monopolies. But you can support Calibre (or like-minded developers) in plenty of ways, from making a donation to writing code to helping out with translations.

Last but not least, Project Gutenberg welcomes all kinds of talent on its volunteering page. You can help put books on DVD for people without access to high-speed Internet; flip through your paper books to find pages that are missing from Project Gutenberg’s copies; help edit the Gutenberg Wiki pages; and proofread new titles in the Gutenberg library.

May these few suggestions help you carry the spirit of giving into the new year, and may your holidays be merry!

S.D. Livingston is the author of several novels, including the suspenseful Kings of Providence. Visit her website for information on her writing—and for more musings on the literary world.

I know, I know. Author readings are a time-honoured part of the literary scene, a way for the solitary writer to break out of seclusion and rejoin the world. A way to connect, really connect, with her readers. But before you clutch your copy of Mockingjay and keel over, let me explain.

Writers need a lot of skills. They need a firm grasp of storytelling, good grammar, imagination, and an eye for detail and continuity. Not to mention the ability to tell “its” from “It’s” (you’d be surprised how rare that particular party trick’s getting).

A talented writer brings all those goods, and more, to the table, whether he spins popular sci-fi tales or esoteric works nominated for the Man Booker Prize. On paper, writers grab our attention and transport us to other worlds. Unfortunately, It’s a rare author indeed who can bring that skill to a live performance—and that’s exactly what a reading is.

If you think about it, we enjoy dozens of spoken performances every day. Radio DJs, TV shows, comedians: whether they’re giving a speech or a traffic update, good performers engage their audience. They work on things like breath and timing and cadence and pitch. The best ones master their craft the same way the best writers focus on plot and character. They quickly learn not to wear washed-out gray sweaters or shuffle through their notes while the audience fidgets.

But sitting hunched over the keyboard or scribbling away in the back of a coffee shop doesn’t leave much time for learning how to become a performer. It involves a completely different set of skills. Which is why, all too often, author readings turn into the equivalent of the dreaded PowerPoint presentation: dull beyond belief and guaranteed to have even the most ardent fan eyeing the clock and wondering how long before the coffee and cookies are trotted out.

It’s no accident that this Onion article rings so painfully true. “You just have to remind yourself that You’re not going to be able to pack the room with half a dozen fans every time,” notes the ever-hopeful (and entirely fictional) author.

When the magic happens, when that happy confluence of writing and performing occurs, It’s a joy. Witness this sample of Stephen Fry reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the tiny green sample button is below the cover). Douglas Adams wrote the book, but Fry’s a prolific scribbler in his own right, and his delivery here proves It’s possible to do both well.

In general, I think the slow demise of author readings bodes just as well for writers as it does for readers. We don’t expect playwrights to bring their own words to life on stage. They leave the performance of those words to the professionals?the actors. Who knows? Book readings might suddenly take a popular upswing if novelists did the same.

I can just see it now: Joanna Lumley reading The Handmaid’s Tale. Now That’s a performance I’d pay to see.