Mary in Alexandria, Virginia, wonders when words like senior and senior citizen came to mean “elderly.” Senior comes from Latin senex, “old,” the source also of Senate and senile. In the 1930s, a politician helped popularize...
A caller wonders why his North Carolina-born partner uses the phrase “I’d have liked to” instead of “I almost” or “I nearly,” as in “I’d have liked to died laughing.” This is part of a...