C’mere—the quick, reduced version of Come here—is an example of what linguists call an allegro form, a sped-up, casual pronunciation or spelling created through phonetic reduction. The lento form, in contrast, is the longer version. In musical...
A Nebraska listener came across his great-grandfather’s account of going out carousing and then returning home at steen o’clock. The context suggested that he meant he returned home extremely late. Although never that common, the expression steen...
If you have two dogs that share a toy, do you write that as my dogs’ toy or my dogs’s toy? It’s one of those things to which we can come up with a logical answer, but then later we’ll catch ourselves doing a different illogical thing. Possessive...
Jason from De Pere, Wisconsin, was surprised to see that among the spelling words his twin second-graders were studying was the contraction this’ll. Is a term like this’ll really appropriate for a second-grade spelling test? This is part of a...
Some of us can remember when typing an exclamation mark required hitting four different keys: the shift key, the apostrophe, the backspace, and the period! This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Typing Punctuation on Old Typewriters, The...
Why, when writing out an abbreviated name like NATO for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, don’t we use periods between the letters to form the acronym or initialism? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Periods in Acronyms?”...