A Denton, Texas, caller wonders: Are politicians increasingly starting sentences with the phrase “Now, look…”? This is part of a complete episode.
A Denton, Texas, caller wonders: Are politicians increasingly starting sentences with the phrase “Now, look…”? This is part of a complete episode.
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...
Meg in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, gets why the state highway department encourages drivers to use their blinkers when changing lanes, but placing a digital sign at the Sagamore Bridge that reads Use Ya Blinkah is, well, a lexical bridge too far. Meg’s...
I wrote in about something like this recently. Specifically, it was about how “I mean” is being used to start a sentence without any previous statement to restate–almost as if there were some unsaid statement that the speaker were just skipping over to get right to the restatement. I’ve noticed this usage just in the last year or two and I was wondering if you’ve noticed it and how it got started.