Some words about words

My brain summons images of people when I read or hear particular words. Maybe this happens to you too.

The word “accommodate” conjures a millisecond image of Dan Shaw, former city editor for the Bellingham Herald, while he taught a journalism class I was in at Western Washington University. He taught us how to remember how to spell accommodate: “Two C’s, two M’s.”

The word “primer,” in reference to a short piece of explanatory writing, summons Bettz Pitcher, a long-gone Olympian copy editor who corrected me after I pronounced “primer” as rhyming with “climber.” It’s pronounced “prim” with an “...