Hundreds of years ago, the word girl could refer to a child of either gender, and the word boy applied specifically to a servant. The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is a useful resource for understanding which terms were in...
This week: Do you ever find yourself less-than-specific about your age? Listeners share some of their favorite phrases for fudging that number, like: “Oh, I’m 29, plus shipping and handling.” Also in this episode: • Since ancient...
There’s the living room, the dining room, the bedroom, the bathroom, and the TV room. So why don’t we call the kitchen the cooking room? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Why Don’t We Call the Kitchen the...
Bill from Marquette, Michigan, asks why pretty works as a modifier in pretty good and pretty bad, even though the pairing seems to defy logic. The answer lies in a split that developed over centuries. In Old English, pretty meant cunning or crafty...
Is it okay to use the word ask as a noun, as in “What’s our ask going to be?” Or should we substitute the word question or request? Actually, the noun ask has handy applications in the world of business and fundraising, where it...
There’s no one correct way to pronounce buried, but depending on where you live, it might be common to hear it in a way that rhymes with hurried. As the spelling of the word changed from the original old English version, byrgan, no single...