What is the letter H doing in the English word ghost? The answer has to do with 15th-century Flemish typesetters working for the English printer William Caxton. They often added an H after an initial hard G to reflect the spelling of cognates in their own language. While many of those spellings didn’t stick, the G in ghost did, probably because the term Holy Ghost appeared so often in early printed works. Linguist Arika Okrent explains a host of linguistic conundrums like that in her new, highly accessible book Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme — and Other Oddities of the English language. (Bookshop|Amazon). This is part of a complete episode.
Unparalleled misalignments are pairs of phrases in which the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other, but the phrases themselves mean different things. For example, the phrase blanket statement can be paired with cover story...
Jameela in Charlotte, North Carolina, says her family refers to their television’s remote control as the clicker, but her friends insist on calling it the remote. These devices go by other names as well, including doofer, flicker, zapper, and...
Subscribe to the fantastic A Way with Words newsletter!
Martha and Grant send occasional messages with language headlines, event announcements, linguistic tidbits, and episode reminders. It’s a great way to stay in touch with what’s happening with the show.
