What do the Spanish words, Lebraria, Exito and Delito, have in common?

Well, they may not mean what you think they mean in English.

Grammar girl here, I'm a neon-fogirty 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 what's wrong with sentences that start with there are.

And then in honor of Cinco de Mayo, I have five fun facts about Spanish.

Have you ever heard it's bad to start sentences with there are, there is, and it is?

These phrases can be part of what are called expletive sentences.

And no, I'm not talking about swearing.

The word expletive comes from Latin that means to fill.

And in English it's come to mean something that takes up space without adding anything.

The swear word meaning goes back to the 1600s and may have been popularized by Sir Walter

Scott in the early 1800s.

And it was definitely popularized by the Watergate tapes in the 1970s that included the

phrase expletive deleted over and over again because Richard Nixon and his aides apparently

had potty mouths.

But we are talking about the grammatical meaning of expletive which goes back even further.

We had the word first, I tell you.

But the two meanings actually have something in common.

They both essentially refer to filler words.

There are and it is is take up space without adding any meaning to the sentences.

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