Author: Samantha Enslen

The medial S is an elongated form of the letter S. It looks like a lowercase F, but with a line sticking out only on the left side of the letter. It was used in manuscripts published between the 8th and 19th centuries, whenever the letter S appeared at the beginning of or in the middle of a word; serf would be ſerf, and hessian would be heſſian, for example. The use of the medial S declined with the rise of the printing press, as printers preferred to use only one consistent S form.

A noun string is a group of nouns or adjectives clumped together to create one single term. They can create confusing and clunky text. To fix a noun string, reorder the phrase to start with the final noun, add prepositions and articles to clarify meaning, and look for opportunities to convert nouns into verbs.

The way things are going in the world, hurricanes this year could be joined by Godzilla or maybe even aliens. Or maybe we’ll be lucky, and it will just be hurricanes. Hurricane season runs from July to September in the Northern Hemisphere and from January to March in the Southern Hemisphere. With that in mind, we started thinking about how hurricanes and other storms get their names. Hurricanes = typhoons = tropical cyclones First of all, hurricanes themselves are called different things in different parts of the world. When they form in the North Atlantic and eastern North Pacific they’re…

A member of our Facebook Grammar Girl group recently wrote in with a question about plurals. He was wondering if we knew why the plurals of some words that end with the letter “y” take an “-s,” whereas others take an “-ies.” Rich, we have an answer for you. Fortunately, in English, plurals do have some consistent rules. Most plurals are formed by adding ‘-s’ or ‘-es’ For example, most plurals are formed by simply adding “-s” or “-es” to the end of a word. If a noun ends with a sound that merges gracefully with the “s” sound, you add…

When it comes to popular music, we’re used to hip-hop, indie rock, and even K-pop topping the charts. But back in 2021, we really didn’t expect the newest trend to be a genre that was out of fashion 150 years ago. Yes, the hot tunes were … sea shanties. What can we say? The depth of the pandemic was a weird time. What is a sea shanty? Sea shanties are songs that sailors sang while they worked. Sailors sang shanties as they worked pumps up and down, removing water from the hold of the ship. They sang shanties as they heaved…

A listener named Al recently wrote in about our segment on the word “reenter.” Sometimes it’s written with a hyphen, and sometimes without. He suggested a third option: using the diaeresis. What is a diaeresis? The diaeresis is a diacritical mark that looks like two little dots above a letter. It sometimes appears in English over the second of two consecutive vowels. If you’re familiar with German, you may have mistaken it for an umlaut since they look the same. The diaeresis’ job in English is to show that the second vowel is treated as a second syllable. Think of the long…

TEACHERS: Scroll to the bottom of the page for lesson ideas. One of our listeners wrote in with a question about what she called “animal verbs” — verbs that take their name from an animal’s characteristic behavior. She wondered if there were a proper name for such verbs. Kathryn, there is a special name for animal sounds, at least ones that imitate the noises that animals make. They’re called onomatopoeia. For example, “quack,” “woof,” and “chirp” are onomatopoeias.  These words mimic the sounds that ducks, dogs, and birds make, respectively. As far as we can find, there’s no special name for words…

Have you ever heard someone say they were going to “put the kibosh” on something? Did you ever wonder what they meant, or what a “kibosh” is? Believe it or not, this has been a long-standing mystery of the English language. Multiple theories have been proposed, but none could be proven. Recently, however, three scholars seem to have gotten to the bottom of it. (2) Here’s the story. ‘To put the kibosh’ on means to shut something down First of all, to “put the kibosh” on something means you’re shutting it down. You’re putting the lid on a plan before…

One of our listeners recently wrote in, wondering about the proper way to describe quantities. She said her sixth-grade English teacher had taught her that “a few” means one or two, and that “several” means three or more. However, following this rule, she sent a work colleague into a panic. She told him that a project would ready in “a few days.” She meant it would be done in a day or two. But he interpreted it, in her words, as an “ambiguous brush-off.” He assumed she was saying she wouldn’t meet her deadline. After they sorted out the confusion,…

A listener recently wrote in to ask about the word “bougie.” He’d heard it being used to mean something elevated or high-class. But he thought it came from the word “bourgeois,” meaning “middle class.” He’s right on both counts. Here’s what we found. First of all, “bougie” is indeed a slang form of “bourgeois.” The more formal word dates back to the 1600s and was probably used even before that. Its root word, in turn, is “bourg,” meaning a town or large village. That word was derived from the Latin “burgus,” meaning a castle or a fortified town. “Bourgeois” originally…