Grammar Girl here, this week I have a quick and dirty tip about lightning versus the lightning.

A piece about one direction and pronouns, and a tidbit about why we call teddy bears, teddy bears.

One thing I like about living in Reno is the cool lightning storms, we get amazing lightning here.

The word lightning is quite old.

The first citation in the Oxford English Tictionary that uses lightning as a noun to describe light from the sky

is from 1377.

Back then, in middle English, spelling was different from our modern English spelling.

Lightning was spelled with a Y, and the letter we don't even use anymore today called a yolk,

that kind of looks like the number 3.

The yolk was eventually replaced with our current letters G and H.

Today, there are two forms of the word lightning, and people often get confused about their spellings.

Dictionaries say that long ago the two words were spelled the same.

They both come from the word light, which goes back even further all the way to Old English before the year 900.

But today, the lightning we've been talking about, the bolt from the sky, doesn't have an E.

It's spelled L-I-G-T-N-I-N-G.

The other kind of lightning, what people do when they get their hair bleached, for example, is spelled with an E.

L-I-G-H-T-E-N-I-N-G.

Lightning without an E can also be a metaphor for something that's fast.

Game shows, games, and even TV shows often have a lightning round.

One of the earliest game shows to have a lightning round was the show Password in 1961,

and Lightning McQueen was the name of one of the racers in the movie Cars.

One of my favorite quotations about lightning comes from Mark Twain.

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