Roses are red, violets are blue—poets they’re called, but you can call them bards, too. Bard is an old-fashioned synonym for poet. In medieval times, the noun bard referred to a person who composed and recited epic or heroic poems, often while playing the harp, lyre, or the like. Earlier still, the term was also used to refer to one of an ancient Celtic order of composers and reciters of poetry. By the time William Shakespeare was rattling off verses, bard was in circulation as a more general term for a lyric or epic poet—and eventually the term came to be associated with Shakespeare himself, who came to be known variously as the Bard of Avon, or, more definitively, the Bard.

The verb heal is used to talk about freeing people or things from ailments and making them healthy, whole, or sound. The synonym restore is not used in exactly the same way; you might heal from a wound, but you would not restore from a wound. You could, however, restore order, that is, reestablish order or bring it back into existence, or you could restore a painting, that is, bring it back to a former condition. But neither of these uses overlap squarely with heal. Restore is closest to heal when used in the context of bringing a person or thing back to a state of health, soundness, or vigor after suffering damage or depletion: After a grueling week that left her feeling quite exhausted, a long hike in the woods restored her vitality. In the context of ecology, the related noun restoration refers to the act of bringing ecosystems that have been damaged or destroyed back into balance by way of human intervention. The theme for Earth Day 2021 is Restore Our Earth, a call to action that invites everyone to take an active part in bringing the world’s ecosystems back into balance through natural processes, emerging green technologies, and innovative thinking.

You might be a procrastinator if one of your favorite words is later (it’s okay, we relate). Specifically, we mean the adverb, as in, Let’s make a decision later. Here, later means “at a time in the future,” or “afterward.” A strong synonym for later is the adverb subsequently. The key idea behind the word subsequently (and the adjective subsequent from which the adverb derives) is that of following or of a sequential order. Both the adverb and the adjective ultimately stem from the Latin verb sequī meaning “to follow.” The prefix sub- indicates proximity or nearness in time. These etymological tidbits shed light on the ways in which subsequently stands apart from later: while their dictionary definitions may be identical, subsequently is the better choice for indicating a relationship or interdependency between chronological events, as in, I visited the Museum of Natural History in New York and subsequently decided to become a paleontologist.