On the Ted Radio Hour, linguist Anne Curzan says she gets a lot of complaints about people using the pronoun they to refer to one person.

I sometimes get into arguments with people where they will say to me but it can't be

singular and I will say but it is.

The history behind words causing a lot of debate that's on the Ted Radio Hour from NPR.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Tammer Keith. I cover the White House.

And today, what has to happen for a presidential candidate to win.

We wanted to revisit a conversation we had last month about the upcoming presidential election.

Of course presidents are elected by the Electoral College.

They have to get at least 270 electoral votes to win from the 538 available. But some states are actually going to be quite competitive.

Danielle Kurtz-Labin and Dominico Montanaro join me for this conversation and I started

by asking Dominico about the electoral map that he had developed.

Yeah, I mean there aren't any huge surprises in the states that we'll be looking at and

focusing on pretty heavily, but they are the ones that we've been talking about in these two sort of buckets, the Blue Wall States of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and the Sunbelt states in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and

to a little bit of a lesser degree, North Carolina.

But essentially, those seven states are going to get billions of dollars in

advertising, almost all of the focus for organizers, with a few exceptions here and

there.

But it really is a shrunken map if you consider where we were, say, 20 years ago.

So let's start in the Midwest, and Domenico, you mentioned the blue wall.

Remind us what is the blue wall? Well the blue wall is

composed of three states Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan and it's sort of

...