The long-awaited results of the Name That Car Game survey are here! I had to throw out some results that did not appear to have valid postal codes or that left the postal code blank. (Unfortunately, due to the original wording of the survey, some people who weren’t familiar with the game answered “N/A” or […]
A few weeks ago, I tweeted about a car game in which players call something out when they see a Volkswagen Beetle and then hit the person next to them. The game is known by a few different names, and I’m wondering if there’s any sort of geographic distribution to the names. Whether or not […]
Several weeks ago, I tweeted about a weird construction that I see frequently at work thanks to our project management system. Whenever someone assigns me to a project, I get an email like the one below: I said that the construction sounded ungrammatical to me—you can ask someone to do something or request that they do it, […]
A few months ago Braden asked in a comment about the history of what as a relative pronoun. (For my previous posts on relative pronouns, see here.) The history of relative pronouns in English is rather complicated, and the system as a whole is still in flux, partly because modern English essentially has two overlapping […]
Yesterday I heard an interesting construction that I’ve only heard of once before. Several months ago a coworker of mine was talking about a family reunion she’d been to, at which one of her cousins had offered her an apple and said, “Here’s you an apple.” I’d never heard anything like it before, but I’d […]
