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 former...
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...
A caller with a 25-year-old parrot wonders: How much language do birds really understand? Plus, Knock-knock. Who’s there? Boo. Well… you can guess the rest. But there was a time when these goofy jokes were a brand-new craze sweeping the nation...
A woman in Middlesex, Vermont, says that when she was a girl her parents sometimes described her as porky, but they weren’t referring to her appearance — they meant she was acting rebelliously. This use of the word might be related to pawky, or...
Lady, woman, and girl carry different signals depending on speaker, listener, age, number, and setting. Rachel, a 22-year-old from upstate New York, heard a hostel roommate described as a lady and pictured someone older. Her Wisconsin friend meant...
Bob in Oceanside, California, learned the practical range of Spanish mordida in Baja: it can mean an actual bite, as in a warning about a dog, and in Mexico it can also mean a bribe, the sort demanded instead of a ticket. The English expression put...