“Yo” said, “yo” said…

May 21, 2012 by

“Yo” said, “yo” said…

A recent LotW post discussed a newly introduced gender-neutral third person Swedish pronoun hen. It appears that a similar gender-neutral pronoun is developing naturally in a local dialect of American English. According to a post on...

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Pop vs. Soda vs. Coke

Mar 7, 2012 by

Pop vs. Soda vs. Coke

Several previous posts discussed differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and even grammar across dialects of American English. Which terms do you use: Sneakers or tennis shoes? Hoagie or hero? Dust bunny or house moss? Do you say...

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Jerusalem artichokes and Jordan almonds: are they from the Middle East...

Feb 13, 2012 by

Jerusalem artichokes and Jordan almonds: are they from the Middle East?

  Despite what their names suggest neither Jerusalem artichokes nor Jordan almonds are from the Middle East. Both expressions are examples of folk etymology, a process by which the form (and sometimes the meaning) of a word is...

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The plural of virus? Latinate plurals reconsidered

Jan 19, 2012 by

The plural of virus? Latinate plurals reconsidered

[Thanks to Cynthia Typaldos for bringing this topic to my attention! The cartoon to the left is from this site] A recent article on paidContent.org by Robert Andrews states:   “Google (NSDQ: GOOG) already operates its own legal...

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American English from sea to shining sea, part 2

Sep 30, 2011 by

In the previous posting, I’ve mentioned a number of lexical peculiarities of various regional American English dialects. Let’s now consider some pronunciation peculiarities. Take, for example, the name Mary, the adjective...

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