John in Tucson, Arizona, remembers his grandfather used the possessives hisn, hern, yourn, and ourn, as in Those cattle are hisn or That house is hern. These archaic forms originated hundreds of years ago, formed by analogy with mine and thine...
Kelsey from Washington, D.C., says her family uses the term wishing well eggs to denote the the result when you cut a hole in the middle of a piece of toast, break an egg over the hole, and then fry up the whole thing. She’s also heard people call...
Mav in Madison, Wisconsin, has heard content creators on platforms like YouTube and Twitch address their viewers collectively with the word chat, as in Chat, is this real? and Do you see this, chat? She’s heard some people describe chat used in this...
Why do we write the word I as a capital letter when using it to refer to ourselves? Is English the only language that capitalizes the first person singular pronoun? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Why is the Pronoun “I”...
You say that it’s raining or it’s cold, but what exactly is it? Sometimes called the weather it or the dummy it, this it in this case is a placeholder that makes sentence work grammatically. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “What is...
The parent of a highschooler in Madison, Wisconsin, says that at the beginning of each semester, when her daughter’s classmates introduce themselves and their preferred pronouns, gender-neutral students often say their pronouns are they and their...