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.
In English, you can express skepticism with the classic saying when pigs fly. In Tagalog, a similar sentiment is expressed with a phrase that translates “when the crow turns white, when the heron turns black,” and there’s a Hungarian phrase that...
Dax in Santa Cruz, California, wonders: Now that we’re into the 21st century, when will people stop saying that initial 20 when referring to a year such as 2028 the way we dropped the 19 in the term 1980s and just started referring to the ’80s? This...
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.