Lydia in Portland, Maine, was texting someone about having seen an opossum, but wasn’t quite sure how to write that out with the article. Is it a or an opposum? Like most Americans, she drops the initial unstressed syllable, making it sound like...
Steve from Fort Worth grew up hearing his mother from the English Midlands use cute to mean sly or shrewd, not adorable. That older sense is the original one, from acute, with the initial a lost by aphesis. The meaning shifted from keen or...