Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, in honor of National Grammar Day, March 4th, we're going to start with a hardcore grammar topic and then move on to some of the most

dramatic grammar stories in history. And if you stick around to the end, I even have a fun

family-elect song. This question came in from a listener. Why do we need the word it at the beginning

of sentences, as in it reigns quite often. Well, the English language has

plenty of quirks, and this is one of them. Who or what is the mysterious it that keeps doing all this

stuff. We find the word it in sentences like, it's raining, but what exactly is doing the raining? It's getting dark. Who

or what is making it dark? It's freezing in here, but who or what ordered the Arctic temperatures?

And it takes time to learn a language. What exactly is doing the taking of time? Think of it in those

sentences as a special kind of pronoun. Most pronouns stand in for actual nouns, like when we say

she went to the store where she stands for Sarah, or squiggly ate them where Them stands in for the cookies.

But this It is more like a grammatical placeholder.

In formal grammar speak, we call this an expletive or dummy subject.

It's kind of like putting extras in movie scenes when the real star is the action itself.

Let's break it down with an example about the weather. It is raining. In that sentence,

it is our placeholder pronoun, the subject of the sentence. Then we have a linking verb,

is. And raining is a present participle. It describes the action.

In that sentence, it isn't actually referring to anything specific. It's just there because

English sentences get stage fright without a subject. It's like having a stand-in actor who doesn't actually perform,

but needs to be there just so the show can go on. You might have been confused when I've referred

to the placeholder it as an expletive. Casually, we usually associate expletives with swear words,

but in linguistic terms, an expletive is just a word

that doesn't have a semantic context of its own. It only serves a grammatical function,

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