Jim in Columbia, South Carolina, has noticed sportscasters’ use of the phrase on the season with reference to a period of time. This construction shows up in the sports pages as early as the 1880s, first referring to a team’s revenue and...
Kinbank is a new database that illustrates the global diversity of family terms. English, for example, specifies sibling relationships with just one of two terms: sister or brother. But most other languages have even more specific terms. In...
Gossip goes by many names: the poop, the scoop, the lowdown, the dope, the scuttlebutt, the 411, the grapes, the gore, and hot tea. Plus, John Donne’s love poems are among the greatest in the English language, even as they’re famously...
Ronald in Columbia, South Carolina, hears some people pronounce the word help as if they’re saying hope. There’s a British dialectal version of the past tense of the verb help that is spelled holp or holpen or hope, which have hung on in...
Charlie from Columbia, South Carolina, wonders about a nickname for his state, South Cack. University of North Carolina linguist Bonnie Taylor-Blake has researched this term and its variants extensively. They include Cackalacky, Cackalacka, Calinky...
In just seconds, online text generators and chatbots can produce whole paragraphs of sophisticated prose. But what do advances in artificial intelligence mean for writers? What is lost and what’s gained when machine-writing replaces the work...