Grammar girl here, I'm Minyon Fogarty 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'll talk about spoons, and then we'll talk about why nouns are more complicated than

you might think.

A few months ago I started to notice people talking about spoons in a weird way. First,

my amazing fiction writing and podcasting friend, Merlaferty, tweeted, I have no spoons for

making decisions today. And then just a few days later, a linguist friend named Lauren

Akerman tweeted, trying to remind myself that just because I have some spoons doesn't

mean I have enough spoons. And I'm like, what is up with all these spoon references?

And maybe you've heard something like this and wondered too. So I got a general sense

of what it means from the context. Spoons are a metaphor for energy, but why spoons?

Well you won't find it in any major dictionary. And I have to confess that for reasons I

can't remember now, I thought it had something to do with Game of Thrones. But of course,

it does not. It turns out that this really useful concept, which is called spoon theory,

also isn't that new. It's actually been around since 2003, but I do think it's moving

more into the mainstream. Here's the deal.

A woman with Lupus named Christine, Missor and Dino came up with the metaphor on the fly

when she was a college student and her good friend and roommate asked her what it felt

like to have Lupus. Not what the symptoms were, but what it felt like to live with Lupus.

The two women were in a dining hall and after casting around for a few seconds, Christine

grabbed a bunch of spoons and handed them to her friend. Then she said something like,

imagine that every time you do something, it costs you a spoon. Getting out of bed,

...