Grammar Girl here. I'm in Jan Faugherty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, in honor of Halloween, we're going to talk about words for fear. And then we'll look at why wherefore doesn't mean what many people think it means. But before we start, I want to respond to a thoughtful comment from a listener named Nathan

about the section in the blue idioms piece last week, where we described some medical

conditions that make people's skin turn blue.

We then ended that part saying, let's hope these conditions become even more rare.

Well, to me, it was kind of a throwaway line

to transition to the next section, which was about the word blue meaning rare. But Nathan

pointed out that since the only symptom we described was skin color, it felt pretty icky.

Like we were saying we wanted there to be fewer people with different skin colors, and it's a

completely valid point.

I didn't think of it that way, and I certainly didn't mean it that way, and I'm sorry that it

could have been interpreted that way.

Thanks for the message, Nathan.

Picture this.

Juliet stands on her balcony dramatically crying out to the night.

Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?

And what do most people think she's asking?

Where are you, Romeo?

But plot twist, wherefore actually means why, not where.

Juliet isn't playing hide and seek with her beloved. Instead, she's having

an existential crisis, basically asking, why do you have to be Romeo Montague? Why couldn't you be

literally anyone else with a different last name? This classic mix-up reveals a truth about Shakespeare. His words are linguistic time

travelers that have been playing tricks on modern readers for more than 400 years. And Wherefore is just the

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