Grimmigirl here.

This week I have a quick and dirty tip about the word botan.

A piece by Neil Whitman about valley girls and the word like.

And a tidbit about German chocolate cake.

Is it really from Germany?

This week a friend who goes by Lucky Strike on Twitter asked me about the word botan.

Lucky Strike's English teacher said botan can be used in passive sentences, such as,

this is something may have botan before.

And although you CAN say that, and in some dialects people DO say it, it is definitely not standard

English.

It was sometimes used in the past, but today it's only used in certain dialects, or sometimes

poetically.

Other than that, it's considered wrong.

Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage calls botan, rustic, and uneducated.

The editors also have an unusually hard time pinning down botan's past use.

Usually they're great at describing how words were used in the past, but here they say

they couldn't find specific proof that it used to be widely used, even though some sources

say it was.

Bot is the standard past participle of the verb to buy.

So to fix Lucky Strike's sentence, you'd say, this is something they have botan before.

Sometimes people also use botan as an adjective to describe something they got at the store,

as opposed to something they made at home.

...