The Language Hoax
John H. McWhorter
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Introduction
- If you think about it, the second way of saying it means hotel cats are, as one says these days, “a thing.” Think of how we say ICE cream rather than iced CREAM—as one did when it was a novelty, or CELL phone rather than cell PHONE—as I recall people saying in the early 1990s. In two-word expressions, the accent tends to shift backward when something becomes “a thing”—that is, cultureDec 22 2023 7:45PM