We get lots of calls and emails that take a pessimistic look at the way language changes– which reminded us that the word pessimism itself, just 100 or so years ago, was derided by the curmudgeons of old. People thought the word pessimism was...
Many of the world’s languages apparently derived from a prehistoric common ancestor known as Indo-European. But since no one ever wrote down a word of it, how do we know what it was like?
What’s lurve got to do with it? A caller is puzzled by a greeting card with the phrase “crazy cosmic lurve god.” Linguistics fans will fan themselves as Grant explains the roots of this expression with linguistic terms like the...