Nadine in San Antonio, Texas, disagrees with her boyfriend, who insists that the word surprise suggests something inherently good, so it’s impossible to call something a bad surprise. A quick look at data from the Brigham Young University corpora of...
Sophia, a 13-year-old from Naperville, Illinois, says she, her sister, and friends use search it up to mean look it up online, despite her mother’s objection that it should be look it up or just search it. The phrasing is real and especially common...
Maybe and perhaps are basically synonyms, but perhaps tends to appear in slightly more formal language. Caller Ron from northeastern Wisconsin noticed as much: he grew up saying maybe, yet he sees perhaps in print and on television. It’s not a...
Aiya from Toronto, Canada, finds that whenever he moves to a new location, he adopts some of the local dialect, which feels a bit uncomfortable. At one point, for example, he found himself unable to recall if he used on accident or by accident to...
Tony, a plumber and pipefitter in Escanaba, Michigan, uses dead nuts when he and his coworkers finish a pipe layout exactly where it needs to be. The nuts in that expression has nothing to do with testicles. Instead, dead is the same emphasizing...
Author Stephen King’s book On Writing is an excellent guide to the craft. In it, he warns that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Much other writing advice also says to cut adverbs, and even adjectives. But is that truly...
