Why do we say that someone’s “worth their salt”? Because in the ancient world salt was such a valuable commodity that we used to pay people in it (and this is why you also get a salary).

One of the most common requests we have gotten over the years is for more example sentences in our dictionaries.

put a check in the margin next to the marked word so the typists don’t go blind trying to find your faint, chicken-scratch underlining in all that text.

The problem was that she was answering them in AAVE, a dialect whose speakers are often painted as ignorant and uneducated.

The first is the weirdest and appears to be consistent across all traditional dictionary publishers: no one starts writing a dictionary in A. Ever.

to

Logic be damned: everybody knows that the more syllables you slap onto a word, the smarter you sound.

no fallacist suggests that we need to reorder the months of the year because the names for a bunch of them—September through December—don’t match up etymologically with their placement in the calendar. September (seven) is the ninth month of the year; October (eight), the tenth; November (nine), the eleventh; and December (ten), the twelfth.

“ultimately there’s a problem to solve with defining, and I ask myself if I’ve come any closer to solving it. It’s like the asymptote on the Cartesian plane: you might get closer and closer to the solution but never reach it.”