Grandma Girl here, I'm in Yon Fog Fog, your friendly guide to the English language.

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

Today we're going to talk about why it often sounds weird

to end a sentence with a contraction.

And then, in honor of Halloween,

we're going to talk about the language of fear.

This first segment is by Neil Whitman.

Have you ever wondered why it's okay to say you are correct or you're welcome, but not I'm smarter than your? Why does it seem like we can't end

a sentence with that contraction for you are? This isn't so much a question about grammar

as it is about English phonology. It reminds me of a very short poem I read one time, which seems to have been written by someone named Ethel Barnett DeVito in the mid-20th century, though I haven't been able to track it down fully.

It seems to be a complaint about either highways or checkout lines and goes like this.

Wherever the place, whatever the time, every lane moves, but the one where I'm.

The poem is funny, at least in my opinion, not only because it's so true, but also because in order to make a rhyme, the author

has deliberately used the contraction, I'm, which just doesn't sound right in this situation. But why doesn't it? Well, the Cambridge grammar of the English language

describes the situation like this. Some English words, in particular

function words such as pronouns, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs

have both strong and weak forms. For example, the strong form of the pronoun you is you the way you pronounce it when you're reading it all by itself

However, it also has a weak form which you'll hear in sentences like, what do you want for lunch?

Did you hear how it was pronounced, yah?

Sometimes this weak form is even spelled, yah.

This is sometimes called a careless pronunciation, but there are actually rules that speakers follow that prohibit weak forms in certain contexts.

For example, if Ardvark were to ask Squiggly, who's your buddy,

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