First of all, I'm a girl here. I'm a neon buggerty. This week I have a click and dirty

tip about the difference between flesh out and flush out. A meaty middle about last

names and a tidbit about where we get the phrase hat trick. And now onto our quenching

dirty tip. Flesh out and flush out are both English expressions but they mean different

things. So don't feel bad if you're not always sure which one to use. When you're developing

a project, putting more meat on its bones, so to speak, you're flushing it out. To

flesh out is to expand something or build it up. Here are two examples. Let's flesh out

this proposal and make it more meaty. We need an all-day meeting to flesh out these ideas.

When you shoe a flock of birds out of hiding, you're flushing them out. Flush out is also

a metaphor for revealing things or clearing them out. Here are two examples. The hunters

flushed out their prey. Let's flush out that politician's real backers. And that was

your quick and dirty tip. Fleshing out is bulking something up. And flushing out is clearing

something out or making it visible. That tip was from my little red book, 101 misused

words you'll never confuse again. I always think of my books by their color and I don't

know why, but that won't help you find them at a bookstore. The title is 101 misused

words you'll never confuse again. Next, I have a meaty middle by Bonnie Mills. This segment

explores last names, otherwise known as family names, surname and sometimes even Christian

names. We'll mix a little bit of history about the origin of names with some rules about

capitalization and other issues. It's hard to say when last names were first used, but

it's easy to group many last names into certain categories. For example, we have last names

based on location, based on occupation and based on the name of our father. Names with

a location origin are based on a place name or a feature of the land. English names based

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