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...
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?”...
A young woman in Charleston, South Carolina, owns a boa constrictor named Wayne, and wonders if it’s correct to say that her father isn’t a fan of Wayne’s. Such double possessives are fine, and have been in use for centuries. This is part of a...
There’s no definite rule for putting the apostrophe “s” after names like Liz or Alex when talking about Liz’s wedding or Alex’s school, but we know for certain that most people say, and write out, the possessive “s.” This is part of a complete...