Your telephone is for talking, right? Or is it? We’re guessing it’s been a while since you sat next to a telephone waiting for it to ring. In fact, maybe you’re one of those people who HATE to see that voicemail message light...
Tor from Vermont asks about makes no never mind to me, a phrase he heard after moving as a teenager from New Jersey to the Northeast Kingdom. It means roughly “I don’t care” or “it makes no difference to me,” with nevermind behaving like a noun. The...
The word victuals is pronounced like “vittles” and refers to cooked foods and shares a Latin root with vitamin and vitality. Sometimes it’s spelled vittles, a form often associated with more informal or rustic speech. This is part...
The term less-than, often written in quotation marks, is an increasingly common way to denote status inequality, especially when it comes to gender. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “”Less-Than”” Hello, you...
What’s the difference between drunk and drunken? If you dig through the linguistic corpora (collections of carefully tagged texts used by linguists and lexicographers), you’ll find that we celebrate with drunken revelry and break into drunken...
On the occasion of National Grammar Day, University of Illinois linguist Dennis Barron has pointed out some arresting posters from a wartime version from the early 20th century. They’re from a 1918 Chicago Women’s Club initiative called...