Saying “I feel,” instead of saying “I think” or “I suppose,” is both prevalent and controversial, particularly among women. A Stanford study found that prefacing a sentence with “I feel,” instead of...
The longer the description of an item on a menu, the more expensive it’ll likely be. In The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, Stanford University linguist Dan Jurafsky shows that with each extra letter in a menu description, the...
Oh no you di-int! The linguistic term for what happens when someone pronounces didn’t as “di-int,” or Martin as Mar-in without the t sound, is called glottalization. Instead of making a t sound with the tongue behind the teeth, a...
brass-plate bank n.— «He was first investigated 20 years ago when he became a subject of a joint Scotland Yard-FBI investigation into so-called “brass-plate” banks on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. The investigation was set up after...
A biology student at Stanford University has a question that’s surely on the minds of many listeners: Is there’s an official term for “baby platypus”? He’s heard the term puggle used to denote these cute little...
ambulance chasing n.— «In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call “ambulance chasing.” He heard a rumor, while spending a year at Stanford, that...