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.
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...
Meg in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, gets why the state highway department encourages drivers to use their blinkers when changing lanes, but placing a digital sign at the Sagamore Bridge that reads Use Ya Blinkah is, well, a lexical bridge too far. Meg’s...
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