Don’t read this column!

Instead, work with it, use your pen or pencil, your voice, not just your eyes and mind. Every week in this section, you will get tips on words, how to build a good vocabulary and lots of general information relating to words.

If you honestly read this column every week, you will go through an intellectual experience that will effect a radical change in you. You will increase your vocabulary, you will sharpen and enrich your thinking; push back your intellectual horizon; improve your facility in handling the English language and thereby your ability to express your thoughts effectively; an understanding of the world in general and of yourself in particular.

Increasing vocabulary does not mean learning the definitions of a large number of obscure words. It only means becoming acquainted with fascinating phenomena of human existence for which words are obviously the verbal description. Doing so will mean treating yourself to an all-round, liberal education. And surely you cannot deny that such an experience will change you intellectually.

A language is a mere sound, isn’t it? It is this language which made the wide range of communication possible. Though each one of us has our own mother tongue, we have English, which is the official language of our beautiful multilingual island-state Mauritius. So we need a common media through which our thoughts can be expressed beyond linguistic barriers.

<B>Ahsveen KUTOWAROO</B>