What a Young Brain Can Do
It’s tempting to imagine that a sentence will translate rather neatly, word by word, from one language to another. It’s also naive. Visit Lexicon Valley...
11 Marras 202239min
What Do You Talk?
The book and lyrics of 'The Music Man' are replete with everyday, ordinary dialogue that, nevertheless, demonstrates how English often works. Visit Lexicon Valley...
29 Loka 202230min
The Problem with You
English used to have a more or less typical array of second person pronouns, with thou and thee for the singular — subject and object cases, respectively — and ye and you for the plural. So what happe...
14 Loka 202231min
The Rodney Dangerfield Pronoun
Comedian Rodney Dangerfield was fond of introducing jokes with a kind of redundancy, for example: “My wife, she told me I was one in a million. I found out she was right.” But those seemingly superflu...
28 Syys 202235min
Is Negro a Slur or Just Antiquated?
The racial reckoning of the past several years has altered the way we think about and use language, often for better but occasionally for worse. Sometimes, what we tend to believe is at odds with wha...
13 Syys 202237min
One Is the Loneliest Number
'Only,' 'lonely,' 'alone' and even 'atone' all derive from the number 'one,' which, by the way, wasn’t always pronounced as if it began with the letter w. Visit L...
31 Elo 202226min
Throw Up, Turn Out & Believe
Words like chit-chat, pitter-patter and wishy-washy are formed that way for a reason beyond the pleasing way that they sound. The vowel change actually signifies something more meaningful to our human...
16 Elo 202247min
Why Fidget Poppers Are "Satisfying"
What does the proliferation of so-called ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos say about the nuanced use of the word "satisfying"? Visit Lexicon Valley....
2 Elo 202241min
