Grammar girl here, I'm in Yonfokrty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

This week we'll talk about naprins and getting a hold of someone.

A while ago, my husband excitedly told me he had a great idea for an app.

Now, I must have been tired because I thought he said he had a great idea for a nap as in

sleeping during the daytime.

We both ended up laughing, but it also reminded me of a story about how certain words came

to be the way they are in English.

The most commonly told story of language changing because of misunderstandings like an

app is the story of the word apron.

Originally, it was called a naprn, N-A-P-R-O-N.

If you go all the way back to Latin, you can trace the roots of apron to the word

MAPA, which meant both tablecloth and MAP.

Because if you spread a large map out on a table, it's a lot like a tablecloth.

The French of the Middle Ages took up the word, replaced the M within N and called it

a naprn.

From there, Middle English dropped the E and used naprn.

Then sometime in the 1400s or 1500s, when people said a naprn, enough people were

mishearing the break between A and naprn that the common phrase became an apron, and naprn

fell out of favor and eventually disappeared.

This whackiness of mishearing creating new words has a few different names.

...