Megan in Monticello, Florida, is bothered by on tomorrow, as in We can do that on tomorrow, because on sounds redundant to her. Rather than being a simple grammatical error, the phrasing is a well-documented dialect feature in parts of the US South...
Noah, a nine-year-old in Yuma, Arizona, asks about cattywampus, the word his mother uses for things that are messed up. It means askew, awry, crooked, or otherwise not as it should be. The origin is uncertain, but the word is at least a century old...
When does a word’s past make it too sensitive to use in the present? In contra dancing, there’s a particular move that dancers traditionally call a gypsy. But there’s a growing recognition that many people find the term gypsy...
Among some African Americans, kitchen means the hair at the nape of the neck, the usage Mary in Kenai, Alaska, heard from her granddaughter. The Dictionary of American Regional English records it from the 1970s, and it is especially associated with...
It’s hard enough to get a new word into the dictionary. But what happens when lawmakers get involved? New Jersey legislators passed a resolution as part of an anti-bullying campaign urging dictionary companies to adopt the word upstander. It...
To “summer and winter” about a matter is an old expression that means “to carry on at great length” about it. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “To Summer and Winter” I came across this old Scots...
