That's What They Say

It's happened to the best of us. There's a saying that you've been using for as long as you can remember. Then one day, someone informs you, hopefully kindly, that you've actually been saying it wrong this whole time. Former users of "take it for granite" and "pre-Madonna" know what we're talking about.

There's a set of questions that we as speakers use regularly and that we may not realize have their own special name. They're called tag questions, and they're everywhere. You probably don't know what a tag question is, do you? You want to learn about tag questions, don’t you? That's probably why you're reading this column, isn't it? By now you've probably figured out what a tag question is, right?

Sometimes we like to ask people what a particular word or phrase means to them. Sometimes when we do that, we get several completely different answers. Take “out-of-pocket,” for example.

It's jarring when you discover that a seemingly harmless everyday word or phrase has an offensive origin story. The Oxford Dictionary's blog has a list of nine words with offensive origins. You probably already know about a few of these, but others such as "no can do" and "long time no see" may come as a surprise. One that caught our eye is "basket case." The first citation of "basket case" in the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1919, soon after the end of World War I. It came from rumors about

If you think about the verb “dive” too hard, it can shake your confidence that you know which past tense to use. Let’s say you’re telling someone about a diving competition you participated in yesterday. Do you tell them you dived yesterday, or do you tell them you dove? Not all verbs cause this sort of confusion. Regular verbs like “play” have the same past tense and past participle – I play, I played, I have played. Irregular verbs like “drive” are a little trickier – I drive, I drove, I have

There are many things in life worth keeping unsullied or unsoiled. From our good name to our best dress shirt, it's preferable to keep things safe from both literal and figurative sullying or soiling. It would seem that "sully" and "soil" have a lot in common. So much so that a listener recently asked if they're related. In fact, they are. Sully comes from the French verb "souiller" which means to pollute or stain. That's the same meaning it had when it came into English in 1615, according to

At this point and time, it's pretty clear that the words "awful" and "awesome" aren't interchangeable. But why do their prefixes sound identical? Our listener Kalen asks: “Why is ‘awesome’ a positive word and ‘awful’ a negative word?” This is a great example of how two words can start in the same place and end up with quite different meanings. Since both of these words meant “awe-inspiring” at one point in their lives, we should look at “awe” first. “Awe” has changed meaning over time, which

Amidst some emails, Professor Anne Curzan recently came across a question from a colleague about "amongst" and "whilst." The colleague wanted to know: "Why did American idiom preserve 'amongst' but drop whilst?" Fair question, though we're not so sure that American idiom has preserved "amongst." In Modern American Usage , lexicographer Bryan Garner addresses "whilst," "amongst," and "amidst." He calls all of them archaisms and goes on to say that "'whilst' reeks of pretension" and "'amongst,' in

A listener named Allen recently wrote to us about a confusing book review. He was reading the Toledo Blade, when he saw a review of Barbara Kingsolver's new novel "Unsheltered." Under a picture of Kingsolver was the caption "Barbara Kingsolver, one of America's hardiest novelists, stumbled on the lost history of [Mary] Treat." Allen says he immediately assumed the reviewer was not impressed with Kingsolver's book. When he read that Kingsolver had "stumbled on" the lost history, Allen thought

This week on That's What They Say, we turn to A.A. Milne's classic children's novel, The House at Pooh Corner . We love this line from a passage in which Piglet has to squeeze himself through a letter box in order to get out of Owl's house: "Piglet squeezed and he squoze, and with one last squoze, he was out." Maybe it's just us, but we think "squoze" is a pretty great non-standard verb. Though it's tempting to categorize "squoze" as a newer addition to English, it's actually at least 200 years

Once you start thinking about words that merit spelling reform, it can be hard to stop. Each year, Professor Anne Curzan asks students in her introductory linguistics classes to decide on one word that should be reformed in terms of spelling. The students have tournaments and eliminate words until they're left with a winner. The first winner this year is "bologna." The student who came up with this one made a convincing argument that the spelling "baloney" should be used for both the lunch meat

When baby sitters first started baby-sitting, we had no way to talk about what they were doing. That's because at first, all we had was a noun – there was no verb to speak of. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun "baby sitter" was first recorded in 1937. The verb "baby-sit" didn’t come along until 1946. Linguists call this a back-formation. A back-formation is when a new word is formed by removing "actual or supposed affixes." In this case, the "er" suffix is removed from the

There used to be a certain level of glitz and glamour associated with being a jet-setter. A jet-setter might attend a fashion show in Paris, then take off for an exclusive party in Dubai. But today we often hear jet-setter used to describe someone who simply travels a lot, even if it's from one dimly-lit hotel conference room to another for business. Regardless of the destination, have you ever wondered why we call someone who flies a lot a "jet-setter" and not a "jet sitter?" The Oxford English

Unless you decided to completely avoid the internet in 2009, there's a good chance you've seen Susan Boyle’s first round performance on Britain’s Got Talent. The Scottish singer’s rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” attracted millions of views on YouTube. No one was more surprised than Boyle herself, who told CNN she was “gobsmacked." Boyle’s description of herself caused a bit of a stir among those unfamiliar with this particular British slang term. To understand the meaning behind "gobsmacked,"

Many would agree that all historic events are historical. But there's some dispute over whether all historical events are historic. This week's topic comes from a listener named Cyndi who says, "It really 'gets my goat' to hear people use the redundant 'historical' when 'historic' will suffice." We hadn't given this much thought before Cyndi brought it up, but we had an intuition that there is an accepted distinction between these two words. We assumed that "historical" events are those that