Ever been in a situation where a group makes a decision to do something, then later finds out that no one really wanted to do that thing in the first place, but everyone went along with it rather than rock the boat? There’s a term for that...
A Carmel, Indiana, teacher is puzzled to hear younger colleagues pronounce the words kitten and mitten as KIH-un and MIH-un, with a noticeable break between the syllables. Linguist David Eddington of Brigham Young University reports that this...
It’s the business of business jargon. Say you’re in line at the drugstore. Does it bother you if the cashier says, “Next guest”? In department stores and coffeeshops, does the term “guest” suggest real...
After a long day of work, you settle in to binge-watch House of Cards, only to discover that everyone else in your time zone wants to watch the same thing, bogging down the Netflix stream. That’s Netflix o’clock. This is part of a...
Dude! We’re used to hearing the word “dude” applied to guys. But increasingly, young women use the word “dude” to address each other. Grant and Martha talk about linguistic research about the meaning and uses of...
What’s the difference between addicting and addictive? Not much, although addictive is the older term. Grant suggests that addicting is more about a quality of the person being affected, whereas if something’s addictive, that’s an...