924. What if I told you that you actually should use “uh” and “um” when you’re giving a talk? And what if I told you “dude” was originally an anti-masculine word? Those are just some of the surprising insights from Valerie Fridland’s new book, “Like, Literally, Dude.”

923. America’s writing coach, Roy Peter Clark, shares his wisdom about the five things every writer he’s ever taught wants to learn.

922. “A dozen of eggs” sounds weird, but why? Rabbits performing violent acts are a common scene in medieval marginalia. But why are they there? Turns out—Monty Python was onto something!

921. Taxes, and the words for them, go back all the way to ancient Egypt. Plus, I have much more to tell you about the phrase “I am sufficiently suffoncified”! It’s an especially fun week on the Grammar Girl podcast.

920. Once you start thinking about it, it’s weird that we have both “a” and “an.” It gets even weirder from there! Plus, modern loneliness, and its solutions, are quite different from what they were when the word was first coined. We look at the history of this formerly rare word.

919. Rebracketing is a fascinating process that gives us more words than you might imagine, even words from French and Spanish! Also, I find a surprising answer to the question of which is correct: “ahold” or “a hold.”

918. Since “drop” can mean both “to release” and “to cancel,” it can get confusing. We look at how this confusion came to be (and how to avoid it). Plus, we wade into the debate about whether there’s a right or a wrong way to pronounce “often.”

917. For National Grammar Day, we answer one of the most common questions I get: How can I improve my grammar? Plus, I explain why parallelism is important, especially in resume writing.

916. Grant Faulkner, author of “The Art of Brevity” and executive director of NaNoWriMo talks with us about how writing very short stories can improve all your writing.