Contrary to what you might think, new research by psychologist James Pennebaker suggests that people who use the pronoun I a lot actually tend to occupy the lower status in a conversation. In addition, Pennebaker and his associates found that people...
Does capitalizing the pronoun I feel like aggrandizing your own self-importance? Timna, an English Composition professor at an Illinois community college, reports that a student refused to capitalize this first person pronoun, arguing that to do so...
Do you have a favorite letter? The sound or typeface varieties of a letter can really catch us. For more about the visual and emotional properties of various letters, check out Simon Garfield’s book about fonts, Just My Type. Grant also recommends...
Dining on a budget? Just whip up some necessity mess or a potato bargain. That’s a pork, onion, and potato stew popular in Eastern Massachusetts. Or how about some Georgia ice cream? It’s a North Florida term for grits. Martha shares a generous...
It’s a grammatical question that trips up even the best writers sometimes: Is it who or whom? A physician says he likes the sentiment in a colleague’s email signature, but he’s not sure it’s 100% grammatical. The sentence: “There are some patients...
In Scots English, something fankled is tangled, messed up, or confused, as with a telephone cord that has worked itself into knots. Gordon in Anaheim, California, picked up fankle from his Scottish wife, and the word fits neatly with Scots fank, a...
