Jeff in Dallas noticed that an early English pre-printed Christmas card read Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. It points to a broader history of merry. In 1800s American English, merry was common for exuberant, joyful pleasure, and it is cognate...
Why do we say that we have a doctor’s appointment instead of an appointment with a doctor? After all, we don’t say we have accountant’s appointments or attorney’s appointments. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript...
So, can a sentence begin with the word so? Which ones? So is oftentimes used in place of therefore to conclude an explanation, but more people are using it as a general sentence-starter, in the same vein as well. Grant notes that while it may be...
Which came first, orange the color or orange the fruit? And what’s a busman’s holiday? Martha and Grant talk about bumbershoots, brollies, nursery rhymes, and alternatives to the word unicycle. Plus, an app-inspired quiz, favorite...
The Google Books Corpus from Mark Davies at Brigham Young University tags words in Google Books with their parts of speech, so you can search how words really combine. For example, suitcase often follows battered, making battered suitcase a cliché...
Databases like the Google Books Corpus can also be used to follow text over time. For example, as the women’s suffrage movement grew around 1910, words relating to women’s rights grew in popularity and frequency of usage. This is part of...
