Courtney in Anchorage, Alaska, and her teenage son disagree: Should that collection of music be called a mixtape or a mixed tape? The former is far more common, and reflects that linguistic process known as lenition or “softening,” in...
Mary, who grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, says her Illinois-born husband calls a tape measure a billy, a usage he learned from his father, who grew up in Canton, Illinois. English has other slangy uses of billy for long metal objects, including a...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a magical puzzle, the answers to which contain the word magic. For example, a motel sign in the ’70s might have included the enticement Magic Fingers, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a practitioner of literature featuring...
If English isn’t your first language, there are lots of ways to learn it, such as memorizing Barack Obama’s speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention. Martha and Grant talk about some of the unusual ways foreigners are learning to speak...
magic booster bag n.—Gloss: Same as booster bag. «It looks like a simple bag on the outside. Once you look inside, you’ll discover the bag is a complex shoplifting tool. “They’ve got aluminum foil, ductwork and gray duct...
It’s one of the biggest grammatical bugaboos of all, the one that bedevils even the most earnest English students: Is it lie or lay? Martha shares a trick for remembering the difference. See below for her clip-and-save chart of these verbs...