Will in Austin, Texas, feels a little odd every time he uses the expression funnily enough. Although the phrase is grammatically correct, it still feels awkward to say. In part, that’s because the adjective funny ends in the letter Y, but...
A young woman from Portland, Oregon, seeks a noun to denote something fake or otherwise dubious. She doesn’t want an obvious swear word, but also doesn’t like the ones she found in the thesaurus. She thinks malarkey, poppycock, and flim...
A caller from New York City wonders about his grandmother’s use of the word says rather than said when she’s telling a story about something that happened in the past. It’s a form of the historical present tense that helps describe...
Margarita from the Dallas area uses anyhow and anyways when she has finished saying something personal and wants to move on. These informal words can function as discourse markers, signaling a transition or wrapping up a thought, though anyways in...
Elise, a seventh-grade teacher in Dallas, Texas, noticed her students using finna in speech and notes, as in finna go to the store. It’s a tight contraction of fixing to, meaning “about to,” common in the American South and Gulf States and also in...
So, um, where do those, er, filler words come from? Discourse particles, as they’re also known, are used to fill those gaps when we’re thinking of what to say but don’t want to lose our turn in a conversation. English isn’t...