Gramer girl here, I'm Inyan Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language.

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

Today we'll talk about a whole bunch of Christmas related words.

Andodheng, decluttering, has become all the rage, but languages are hoarders that hang

on to every bit of used clothing, the red bear cushion or musty old piece of luggage.

I mean, you never know, these might be useful one day.

Christmas is a great reminder of how important it is to hang on to some old stuff.

Decorations, stoding closets, dusty words, lingering in our brains.

By Christmas, we drag out boxes of tinsel, bobbles and fairy lights, but we also try to out

words, meanings and even grammar that we stopped using in our everyday language long ago.

So let's unpack this dusty box of Christmas lexical curiosities.

We'll toll tolls, blaze ulls, graze mules, and then finish with a Christmas cracker

of a linguistic joke.

There's no worse than any other you'll hear this holiday season.

Untangling and dusting off these lexical curiosities, like those Christmas lights we have

hazardly stowed the year before, takes some work.

We need to go further than the lyrics of our favorite Christmas carols to see it.

For example, the puzzling line in Deck the Halls that instructs us to troll the ancient

Ull Tide Carol. Trolls sound scary.

If they're not leaving offensive messages on the internet, they're giants living in

Tolkien's middle earth.

...