sprachwaffe

I usually justify my use of “y’all” (my only linguistic souvenir from living 18 years in the South) by saying English doesn’t have any other useful second-person plural form. I’ve been led to believe that English *did* have separate second-person forms for singular and plural/formal (thou and you), but we sort of lost “thou” along [...]

What recourse do people have (other than asking an expert such as Dr. Language Person) when trying to look up a word from it’s definition? Phone books have their Reverse Lookup tables; is there an analogue for Dictionaries? Cleary a thesaurus is a good start, but thesauri become less and less useful as [...]