HeyJaredJohn’s Substack
Reflections, suggestions & discoveries from a long life of writing, editing, and reviewing; posts should interest both writers (published and aspiring) and those rare beasts, people who simply love reading, and thinking about what they read.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 15
- Latest publication
- Sep 28, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 10, 2026
Latest issues
Nice Ways to Say Nasty Things (opens the original)
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Today’s topic is euphemisms, polite or roundabout ways of referring to things or experiences that are difficult, frightening, visceral, or just get in the way of selling something. Euphemisms sidestep to soften the blow. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says the word comes from the Greek eúphēmos, which means "sounding good". Learning these starts early in life, when a parent asks a child, “Do you need to go potty?” or denotes the types of excretion as wee-wee, Number One or Number Two.<a class="i
Scams that Target Writers (opens the original)
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<img alt="How to watch and stream Con Artist - 2004 on Roku" class="sizing-normal" height="319.5" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NhsW!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%
Fight of the Century: Metonymy vs. Synecdoche (opens the original)
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Metonymy and synecdoche sound like obscure medical terms, don’t they? “I’m afraid your synecdoche is occluded, so we’ll have to perform a laproscopic metonymy right away.” Actually, they’re linguistic moves from the rich storehouse of rhetorical devices developed a couple of millennia ago. They’re both ways of coining an alternative word or phrase for a noun.Metonymy plays with a term that has some connection or association with the original word. For example, using “the Kremlin” to mean Russia’
Meta-words (opens the original)
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What are meta-words, you ask? No, they’re not yet owned by Mark Zuckerberg. They describe either certain types of words, or ways of mangling them. So I’ve pulled a few out of my dusty brain and looked for examples to amuse you. I think, given these times, in which a lunatic is running the most powerful country in the world, wars continue in Iran and Ukraine, and experts are estimating there’s a ten percent chance that AI will kill us all in a decade… we need some amusement.PORTMANTEAUS <a class=
The Palace of Purification (opens the original)
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<img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="1952" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8Z_E!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fabccf0d3-597f-4455-a046-1543d0bd4379_2980x3996.
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