Grandma Girl here. I'm Minion Foculty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, roles, and other cool stuff. Today,

we're going to talk about what you say to your boss when you're going to be absent

from work, how babies actually learn to speak like adults, and about being hexabubiated.

Hi, Grandma Girl. This is Ellen from Newark, California. I have a question. I am 60 years

old and I always use the phrase or heard the phrase, calling in sick. If I couldn't make

it to work or if someone couldn't make it to work, they would call in to say they were

sick and couldn't come to work. But in recent years, like within the last 10 years, I have

heard family members say they're calling out. That sounded very strange to me. Even today

in the Washington Post, there was an article and sure enough, it used the phrase, calling

out sick because of COVID employees were calling out. I was curious about the phrase calling

in sick and calling out sick. Thanks a lot.

This was for the question, Ellen. I have always said call in sick. The way I think of it

is that you call in to the office to say you'll be out sick. And if I call in and you take

the call, you would tell everyone else that Minyeon is going to be off sick or out sick

today. Looking at how often these phrases appear in books that Google has scanned, I found

that call in sick is dramatically more common than call out sick in both American and British

English. In fact, call out sick doesn't even seem to appear in books categorized by British

English at all. And it's the same when you look at variations like call and calling. I

found the same thing when I looked at the corpus of contemporary American English call

in sick shows up about a hundred times more often than call out sick. Now that database

does have more casual sources than the Google books database like transcripts from movies

...