The words we choose can change attitudes — and change lives. A swing-dance instructor has switched to gender-neutral language when teaching couples. He says that using words like “leader” and “follower” actually works better...
Hundreds of years ago, the word girl didn’t necessarily mean a female child — in the 14th and 15th centuries, it could refer to a child of either sex. Only later did its meaning become more specific. • Some people think that referring to a...
Hundreds of years ago, the word girl could refer to a child of either gender, and the word boy applied specifically to a servant. The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is a useful resource for understanding which terms were in...
Morgan in San Antonio, Texas, wondered why toasted sounded like a reference to alcohol to some readers of her social media post and marijuana to others. Both readings are possible. Toasted broadly means intoxicated, with context and community...
A Carmel, Indiana, teacher is puzzled to hear younger colleagues pronounce the words kitten and mitten as KIH-un and MIH-un, with a noticeable break between the syllables. Linguist David Eddington of Brigham Young University reports that this...
What’s the most effective way to respond to someone who keeps apologizing for the same offense? Say, for example, that a co-worker is habitually late to work, and is forever apologizing for it, but does nothing to change that behavior? How do...