Grammar Girl here, I'm Nyan Fog Fog Fog, your friendly guide to the English language.

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

Today I have a piece about a question both practical and profound.

What is a word?

This is actually a condensed excerpt from the book, Why Is This A Question by Paul Anthony Jones?

He'll be a guest on the show this Thursday.

And I asked him if I could excerpt it because I think it is the best treatment of the question that I've seen in all my years as grammar girl.

Have you ever been asked what a word means, but found yourself utterly unable to explain it?

I can still remember the look of panic on my school teacher's face when a boy in my class asked her what Grace was and why Mary was so full of it.

And then there was a friend of mine whose endlessly curious three-year-old asked him what depth meant when he was

filling her paddling pool during a lazy summer barbecue and in doing so instantly

bamboozled every adult in earshot. Some words it seems are just difficult to define.

We know what they mean and can use them without a second thought, but trying to put that meaning into words and it's hard not

to resort to little more than a string of synonyms.

Depth. Well, it's just depth, isn't it, like a deepness?

When it comes to defining our indefinables,

one of the great ironies of language is that the word word is one of them.

It might not seem as though it should prompt the same naval gazing as something like grace.

And if someone were to ask you what a word was you'd

probably be able to give them a fair idea. A word, well it's a word isn't it like a

little bit of language.

But in practice, words are surprisingly difficult

...