Sangwich, sammitch, and samwidge are natural workarounds for the tricky consonant cluster in sandwich. Eric in San Antonio grew up hearing sangwich from parents, grandparents, and friends, then changed his pronunciation after seeing the word in...
You’uns is a dialectal second-person plural meaning roughly “you and yours,” including family, household, or close companions. Angelina in western Montana heard it from longtime neighbors in northwest Arkansas after growing up with y’all in Dallas...
Martha Barnette gets a call from Martha Barnett, her Canadian tocaya who’s missing an “e” at the end of her last name. On the Global News website, you can see that the name Martha, perhaps now an anomaly in Canada, peaked in...
A physician wants to know: Is it politically correct to use the phrase illegal alien? The Society of Professional Journalists have decided, collectively, to use illegal immigrant but even words like illegal or undocumented can often be inaccurate...
visa run n.— «Many people who have come to work in Taiwan have had to undertake the inglorious journey of what is commonly called a “visa run,” in order to acquire the necessary status to work here legally. The phrase instantly brings to...
border shopping n.— «Since coming back to Canada, he’s tried to cross again, unsuccessfully, at other ports of entry—because his U.S. employer still wants him back. Gibbons said, each time, he was made to feel more and more like a...