tromboniator said Sans has been used in English for more than 600 years, and lost the French pronunciation long, long ago. This promp...
On semantic weakening: How much simpler it would have been for the USA and its allies invading Iraq looking for WMD if "Weapon of mass destruction" me...
In my Hiberno-English (which is more-or-less British English), we still have the separate words "draught" and "draft" which have merged into a single ...
The French musical artist Camille said on NPR that, to her, English is all about vowels. (transcript)
I've heard it called the wayback, but I can't remember where. What I'm curious about is the name for the type of car which has a wayback. Here in t...
The term battle buddy might be as recent as you claim, but I would be surprised if the practice was as new. I recently listened to a BBC Witness docum...
When there were nine planets in the Solar System, we had "My Very Earnest Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets." After Pluto was reclassified, the teach...
Prices are usually free, unless you have to pay for a quotation. From Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: "The name of the song is called...
I would pronounce your vowel merger examples distinctly, but I believe some more subtle vowel mergers are occurring. For example, I distinguish "book"...
"I"m done" sounds wrong to me, making me think of being fully cooked, as Martha suggested. "I"m finished" sounds slightly better, but still makes me t...
Here in the British Isles, we have departments called menswear, womenswear and childrenswear, but some shops spoil the ambiguity by having a ladieswea...
You've covered slips showing before. The phrase I remember from school in South Wales in the 70s is "Charley's dead." I don't know who Charley was. ...
Mud duck as a racial slur sounds very like JK Rowling's mudblood. Any connection?
"Cotton to" sounds odd to my ears, but I'm very familiar with "Cotton on to" as meaning coming to realise the meaning of something. They must be relat...
In Ireland, there was a political party which changed its name several times from Official Sinn Féin, to Sinn Féin the Workers' Party, to The Worker...