Grammar Girl here, I'm Mignon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide

to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today we'll talk about words from Caesar's time and my editor and I will save you from

ruining your relationship by using the word penultimate wrong.

But before we go on, I have a correction to make.

The name of the town that looks like Berlin, Connecticut, is actually pronounced Berlin.

Mark and Ed both wrote in, apparently it's a quick way for locals to identify people

from out of state, a chibalith, if you will.

Mark said that quote, during World War II, the town council passed a law declaring the

pronunciation of the town's name to have an emphasis on the first syllable to distinguish

it from the then-enemy German city, unquote.

So there you go, my apologies to the people of Berlin.

Also last week I speculated that World War II troops may have had cake in their rations,

giving rise to the term cake hole for your mouth, but I couldn't find any evidence that

they did.

Well, Tom from Alaska wrote in saying quote, military sea rations that I ate surplus as a

forest service firefighter in the 70s often had pound cake in a can.

We had fun seeing how far the cake, not the can, would bounce down the hill, unquote.

So knowing it was pound cake helped me do more specific searches and I found some more

information.

It looks like pound cake wasn't included in rations until 1958.

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