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...
Hi, all! In this week's archive edition, we discuss classic children's books, Faulknerian language, the double meaning of "sanction" and other Janus words, and a newcomer to Texas wants to talk like his neighbors: Summer reruns are...
A woman from Indianapolis is trying to convince her grandmother that it’s okay for restaurant servers to refer to both male and female customers as you guys. Grandma says it’s sexist. Our caller maintains it’s fine, drawing an...
A Pensacola man says he’s invented a gender-neutral pronoun, and wants to know how to popularize it. He’s not the first to try, as shown by linguist Dennis Baron’s chronology of failed attempts to create and popularize epicene...
It’s a grammatical question that trips up even the best writers sometimes: Is it who or whom? A physician says he likes the sentiment in a colleague’s email signature, but he’s not sure it’s 100% grammatical. The sentence:...
David in Port Washington, Wisconsin, wonders why English capitalizes the first-person singular pronoun I, but not me, we, or us. The usual explanation is practical rather than psychological: a lone lowercase i, especially before the dot became...