Author: Brenda Thomas

This is a story about how a city got its curious name and what it means to be a namesake. The story begins in the late 1890s and takes place in rural Minnesota. James Hare had become the new postmaster of Burns Township, but he had a problem. He wanted to reactivate the Burns Post Office but was told by the United States Post Office Department that he had to come up with a new name for it. Sometime during the three years the post office had been deactivated, another one had opened up elsewhere in the state using the…

When autumn begins in the northern hemisphere, people often decorate their businesses and homes to get ready for Halloween. In 2021, the National Retail Federation said Americans would spend a whopping $3.2 billion on Halloween decorations that year, so as you can imagine (or as you may have seen in your own neighborhood) these decorations can be quite elaborate. You often see mummies, witches, skeletons, spiders, jack-o-lanterns, black cats, cobwebs, ghosts, and tombstones. Or are they headstones? Or gravestones? Is there a difference? Does it even matter? The words tombstone and gravestone used to refer to large stone slabs that…

Sometimes people run afoul of standard grammar if they use the word “borrow” when they should have used “lend” or say “lend” when they should have said “borrow.” The confusion is understandable, since borrowing and lending are both actions related to one transaction, and in some dialects people do say things such as “Can you borrow me some money? or “Can I lend your pen?” But in Standard English, those two actions are different, and the words “borrow” and “lend” aren’t interchangeable because they involve different actions and mean different things. To understand the difference in meaning between “borrow” and…