Grammar 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, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today we're going to talk about freezing cold binomials and why being square is uncool.

When you put the pepper and salt on the table, we'll use stop walking forth and back,

you're going to wear out the carpet.

I just have to tie up a few ends and odds before I quit for the day.

And by the way, how many uncles and aunts do you have?

Did you just cringe hearing those backwards sets of words as much as I did saying them?

It's an odd but well-known thing in English and other languages that some word pairs,

like sticks and stones, just sound more right when we say them in a certain order.

Linguists call word pairs like this binomials and if the words appear in the same order,

most of the time, they're called frozen binomials.

If words are a jumble of dancers, we negotiate into phrases and sentences.

Imagine frozen binomials as a pair of dancers frozen in place like statues.

I occasionally get questions from thoughtful listeners who have noticed this phenomenon

and wondered why it happens.

For example, Kurt recently asked on Facebook why we say guys and dolls and guys and gals

instead of dolls and guys or gals and guys.

One theory he had was that maybe we tend to put men before women in such pairs and he's

definitely on to something.

When I started looking into the question, it kind of blew my mind how many researchers

...