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Rare False Friends

You might assume that the Welsh word plant means the same thing it does in English, but this word is a linguistic false friend. The Welsh word plentyn means “child,” and the word plant means “children.” Some false friends are...

Third Person Singular, Unknown Gender

What’s the rule on using they and their in place of his and hers? Grammarians a couple of centuries ago may have misapplied some Latin rules of grammar to the unruly English language, but the issue is clear today: the word they functions...

Sexless Objects

Our two most recently aired episodes were Going All-City last week and The College Slang Party the week before that. They’re reruns more than six months old β€” which means you’ve forgotten half of what’s in them, right? Give...

Male and Female Guys

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...

Whom or Who

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:...

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