The die is cast has nothing to do with dye in water or a metal mold. The die is the singular of dice, and cast here means thrown, the older sense still found inside broadcast and podcast. Brian in Indianapolis ran into the phrase as the title of a...
A Pensacola man says he’s invented a gender-neutral pronoun, and wants to know how to popularize it. He’s not the first to try, as shown by linguist Dennis Baron’s chronology of failed attempts to create and popularize epicene pronouns. This is part...
David in Port Washington, Wisconsin, wonders why English capitalizes the first-person singular pronoun I, but not me, we, or us. The usual explanation is practical rather than psychological: a lone lowercase i, especially before the dot became...
