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...
Grant responds to a voicemail from Doug in Louisville, Kentucky, who asks whether our phone’s autocomplete function will affect the way we talk and write. The answer is yes, partly because of Markov chains, or models describing a sequence of...
What’s the rule on using they and their in place of his and hers? Grammarians a couple of centuries ago may have misapplied some Latin rules of grammar to the unruly English language, but the issue is clear today: the word they functions...
A Pensacola man says he’s invented a gender-neutral pronoun, and wants to know how to popularize it. He’s not the first to try, as shown by linguist Dennis Baron’s chronology of failed attempts to create and popularize epicene...