[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪

Grammar Girl here, I'm Minion Fogherty, and this week I have a tidbit about sofa, couch,

and other words for that piece of furniture, and a meeting middle about idioms that used the word skeleton.

But first, I have to share this review from Simon J. Bandarob in Canada at the top of the show,

because the coincidence was amazing. Simon used to listen while volunteering at the

Bread and Puppet Theater Company in Vermont. But get this! He wrote, quote,

Now that I'm back in Canada, I often listen to Grammar Girl while playing video games,

like civilization. Grammar Girl, when you were giving a shout out to civilization,

I was assigning routes to your favorite units, the caravan. Unquote. That kind of blew my mind.

Simon also asked me to keep in mind dialects of English besides British and American. He said,

Commonwealth folks have our own style guides and spellings that don't necessarily

cleave to British or American English. Unquote. That's a lot tougher for me, but I will try

as I'm in. In fact, today's tidbit touches a bit on Canadian English, so let's get to it.

What you call a long, a polstered piece of living room furniture depends on where you live

and when you were born. For example, couch and sofa are currently the most popular names,

but my parents called it a Davenport, because that name was once popular in the Upper Mid-West,

which is where my parents grew up. The name came from the AH Davenport Company, a manufacturer of

this type of furniture in the mid-1800s and into the early 1900s, including pieces that furnished

the White House. From a Google and Graham search in books, it looks as if Davenport peaked in the

United States in the mid-1940s, after which it's used dropped dramatically and then has been stable

at a lower rate since around 1970. In 2009, I posted a non-scientific online poll asking what you

call a long, a polstered piece of furniture and nearly 4,500 people replied.

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