Alan from Omaha, Nebraska, finds himself turning nouns into verbs, telling his daughter he’s glad she’s old enough to start to human and using jenga as a verb to refer to arranging items carefully, after the game Jenga, which involves...
A young caller from Austin, Texas, wonders: Why do we say things like go to the store or go to the park, but leave out the word the when we say go home? In this case, the word home functions as an adverb. The same is true for phrases such as go...
Nadine in San Antonio, Texas, disagrees with her boyfriend, who insists that the word surprise suggests something inherently good, so it’s impossible to call something a bad surprise. A quick look at data from the Brigham Young University corpora of...
Is a number a noun or an adjective? Even dictionary editors struggle with how to classify parts of speech. Like color, such words often lie along a spectrum, and asking at what point the number seven goes from a noun to an adjective is like asking...
Denise in Webster, New Hampshire, asks about jonesing for, now ordinary slang for craving something badly. It comes from the speech of people using heroin, where jones was already current by 1962 and may go back to the 1950s. The word has done what...
A listener has a question about emoticons, those little sideways symbols you type to suggest emotions in informal electronic writing. You know, like using a colon, dash, and a capital P to stick out your tongue like this 😛 or using a colon, dash...