1073. Today, we have practical tips for writing better paragraphs (and it's not the formulaic topic-sentence structure). Then, we look at the surprising history of phrases like “mad money” and “pin money” and what they show about women’s roles and financial independence through time.
1073. Today, we have practical tips for writing better paragraphs (and it's not the formulaic topic-sentence structure). Then, we look at the surprising history of phrases like “mad money” and “pin money” and what they show about women’s roles and financial independence through time.
The "paragraph" segment originally appeared on the OUP Blog, and was written by Edwin Battistella, who taught linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University. He is the author of Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology, Do You Make These Mistakes in English?, Bad Language, and The Logic of Markedness.
The "mad money" segment is by Karen Lunde, a career writer and editor. In the late '90s, as a young mom with two kids and a dog, she founded one of the internet's first writing workshop communities. These days, she facilitates expressive writing workshops, both online and off. Find her at chanterellestorystudio.com
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about what makes something a good paragraph, and then we're going to talk about what some words and phrases for money actually tell us about history.
This first segment was written by Edwin Battistella.
by Edwin Battistella
We should pay more attention to paragraphs. I know that sounds obvious, but what I’m fretting about is the advice that beginning writers get to begin paragraphs with topic sentences and end with summary sentences.
Such a topic sandwich—filled in with subpoints, supporting sentences, and examples—lends itself to formulaic writing. This strategy of tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them can be useful for public speaking, where listeners don’t have a text to follow. But in written exposition, readers don’t need you to be quite such a tour guide. They can refer back to the previous text. They can read slowly when they need to, or skim or skip ahead when they get bored. And if you bore them, they will skip ahead.
Designing good paragraphs is not about talking people on a walk, but about treating them to an experience. So paragraphing is less about being a tour guide than it is about being the conductor of a symphony.
A paragraph can end in a sharp point, a pin-prick that wakes readers up and focuses their attention on what you’ve just written. Readers should think “Oh!” not “Yup.” (I tried to do that just before with the sentence “And if you bore them, they will skip ahead.”)
Sometimes good paragraphing is as simple as letting the start of one paragraph serve as the conclusion to the last, leaving readers hanging for half a beat. Raffi Khatchadourian does this in his essay “The Taste Makers,” writing about the flavor industry. Khatchadourian tells readers about the confidentiality agreements that makers of food flavorings sign. The paragraph ends with an example of a company honoring the agreement even years later. Asked about their flavor development for Snapple, the Brooklyn-based flavoring company Virginia Dare “refused to discuss the matter.” The next paragraph opens with the broader point: “Such secrecy helps shape the story of our food.” Had Khatchadourian ended his previous paragraph with that line, it would be a flat summary. At the beginning of the next paragraph, however, it sets the trajectory for the next part of the essay.
Another example comes from Dan Jurafsky’s “The Language of Food.” In one paragraph, Jurafsky explains the early technology of distillation, its perfection by Arabic and Persian scientists, and its geographic spread. The next paragraph opens with the sharper linguistic point that “All this history, of course, is there in the words.” Khatchadourian and Jurafsky let their examples sink in for a moment before telling us why they are significant.
A paragraph can also end in a jump cut, an image or idea that occurs in a slightly different form later. Writer Louie Menand does this in his essay “Cat People.” Menand engages his readers in a literary analysis of “The Cat in the Hat.” “Every reader,” he deadpans, “will feel that the story revolves around a piece of withheld information,” where does the mother go, and why. It is a story, he suggests of the “violation of domestic taboos.” The paragraph that follows segues neatly from literary analysis to Suess’s biography. Menand begins the paragraph with the sentence “The decision to turn ‘The Cat in the Hat’ on the trope of the mater abscondita is not without interest, coming, as it does, from a writer who chose his mother’s maiden name as his pen name.” The reader is hooked.
On occasion too, the best paragraphs are single sentences. In his book “The True Believer,” Eric Hoffer gives a long, complex discussion of the effect of mass movements on individuals. The explanation involves concepts like diminuation, the untenable self, and the burdens of autonomous existence. His next paragraph drives the point home: “The true believer is eternally incomplete, eternally insecure.”
We often read for information and for story. We sometimes pause to enjoy great sentences, fresh images, and lyricism. Let’s not ignore the humble — but noble — paragraph.
That segment originally appeared on the OUP Blog, and was written by Edwin Battistella, who taught linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University. He is the author of Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology, Do You Make These Mistakes in English?, Bad Language, and The Logic of Markedness.
by Karen Lunde
Ever wonder why we call a little extra spending money "mad money" like one of our listeners named Amy wondered? Or maybe you found yourself curious about the term "pin money" while binge-watching "Bridgerton."
These money-related phrases aren't just old-fashioned expressions. They actually tell fascinating stories about the evolution of women and money in society.
Today, you probably won't hear the term "pin money" very often unless you're watching a historical drama or reading historical fiction, but we do still use it. These days, "pin money" refers to a trivial amount of money or something you've set aside for incidentals. For example, you might say something like, "I'll use my pin money to buy us a couple of coffees for the road!" before you set off on a journey.
But in the late 1600s, when the term "pin money" first appeared on the scene, it referred to an allowance given by a man to a woman in his family, such as his wife or daughter.
Where does the word "pin" come in? Well, some sources say that "pin money" literally referred to money to buy pins for dressmaking or securing garments. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "pin money" is "a (usually annual) sum allotted to a woman for clothing and other personal expenses; especially such an allowance provided for a wife's private expenditure."
The first known use of the term was actually in a legal document from 1674, in which a woman requested "200 [pounds] per annum, pin-mony [sic] in case of separation" after providing an affidavit of "hard usage" — in other words, cruel treatment. So in this instance, the term appears to refer to yearly maintenance payments, which would be granted if the husband and wife separated, to help provide for her security.
According to Google Ngrams, usage of the term "pin money" peaked in 1777. It dropped pretty steadily after that, but it saw a brief revival in the early 1900s, and it's been on the rise again. Who knows? Maybe that's thanks in part to it cropping up in historical settings in current pop culture.
Now, let's fast forward to the 1920s. Women were going on dates without chaperones — scandalous! — and making strides to become more independent. The 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1919, but many banks still didn't allow women to open accounts without their husband's co-signature. Many jobs were still out of reach for women, too, so true financial independence was a way off.
Enter "mad money" – cash a woman carried for emergencies or unexpected expenses, or surplus money that a woman could spend on a whim.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "mad money" first appeared in the Lima News & Times-Democrat in 1922 — that's Lima, Ohio. It read:
"The 1922 girl always ‘squirrels’ or hides, a few dollar bills known as ‘mad’ money."
And as an aside, the word "squirrels" is in quotation marks in that sentence because it was also a new word at the time. I mean, people had been talking about squirrels — the animals — for hundreds of years, but using the word as a verb to describe hiding or hoarding money like a squirrel hides or hoards food was new.
As for "mad money," Merriam-Webster says it's an old-fashioned term for "money that a woman carries to pay her fare home in case a date ends badly (as in a quarrel)." But these days, the term is less tied to gender and simply refers to an emergency fund or a small surplus for personal use.
So, you wouldn't use "mad money" to regularly pay your bills . . . even if your bills regularly make you mad.
And here's a more rural idiom: "butter and egg money." It's a term that refers to the extra money women earned from their work, particularly on farms.
Think of "butter and egg money" as the original side hustle, but with cows and chickens! Although today's entrepreneurs might earn extra cash through online shops or ride-sharing, farm wives created their own pocket money through skilled work with dairy and poultry.
"Butter and egg money" wasn't just a saying — it was a real source of independence for farm women. While men typically controlled the main farm income from crops like tobacco, women managed the chicken coops and dairy production. It was one of the few ways farm wives could earn their own income.
Take Elizabeth Robinson of Maryland. According to the Smithsonian Collection Blog, during the 1950s she kept detailed farm diaries. She carefully tracked every egg collected and dollar earned from selling eggs and butter. In 1951 alone, she made $237.25 from these sales, which would be about $2,900 today.
These money phrases are like little time capsules. As women gained more financial rights, some terms disappeared while others changed meaning. "Pin money" sounds old-fashioned now, but "mad money" is still around.
Modern financial language aims to be more inclusive. We talk about "emergency funds" instead of "mad money," and "personal spending" instead of "pin money." But these old terms remind us how far we've come — from needing special words for women's money to having a financial vocabulary that works for everyone.
Next time you set aside some "mad money" for emergency cash or earn "butter and egg money" from your neighborhood farm stand, remember: you're using words that tell a story of women's growing financial independence.
Karen Lunde is a career writer and editor. In the late '90s, as a young mom with two kids and a dog, she founded one of the internet's first writing workshop communities. These days, she facilitates expressive writing workshops, both online and off. Find her at chanterellestorystudio.com.
Before we get to this week's familect, I have a correction to a familect from a couple of weeks ago. Somehow, Katie West's familect didn't come through quite right in episode 1067. Here's the fully correct thing Katie's friend Fissey Ray says when you ask a silly question, or she can't quite understand what was said, or the question that was asked — she asks, "Do what with how many cookies?" Not just "How many cookies?" but "Do what with how many cookies?" It's important we get these things right since we're probably the only place they are going to show up online, so thanks for the follow-up call, Katie.
And regarding your question about the "I before E, except after C" guideline. I don't know exactly how many words break the rule in English, but it's a lot, and if you want to learn more, I covered it about eight months ago in episode 1007.
And finally, here's today's familect.
Hi, Mignon. My name's Alicia. I'm from New Jersey, and I've got a familect for you.
Many years ago, my husband Brian and I were on the way to a Bruce Springsteen concert. My sister Christina and her husband, also named Brian, were also on the way in a separate car. We all kind of had to go to the bathroom a little bit. You know, you're starting out, you have to go pee. Well, okay.
But there was an accident on the way to the show, and Bruce actually heard about the accident and delayed his show by three hours so that everybody could get there.
But you know you're in the car, and you can't pull off the road because you're stuck in the traffic, and it's not moving, and it's getting worse and worse, and you really have to go, and you really have to go. Eventually, we were all able to pull off into a shopping center and go to the bathroom there.
But the point is we made an E Street Band scale of how bad we had to pee. So we all started off kind of Suzy Tyrell bad, and we worked our way up the E Street Band until we got to little Stevie Van Zandt bad, that was pretty bad. Then we got to Clarence Clemens bad, that's pretty bad too. And the worst that you could possibly have to go, your bladder is about to burst, is Bruce Springsteen bad. And we got up to Bruce Springsteen bad.
And now that has sort of gone into our whole friends group, like how bad do you have to go? Ah, I just got to go Suzy Tyrell. No, I've got to go Bruce bad. That means you need to find a bathroom immediately.
Thanks so much for the show. Bye.
Thank YOU so much Alicia. I love this, and I hope that somebody listening knows somebody who knows someone in the band, so they can know that they are part of your family's bathroom urgency scale. That's great!
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word or phrase that you only use with your friends or family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp, and if you want that number or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Nat Hoopes in Marketing; Dan Feierabend in audio; Brannan Goetschius, director of podcasts; Holly Hutchings in digital operations; Morgan Christianson in advertising, and an extra special thank you this week to Davina Tomlin who you know as our hiking, belly dancing, circus-acrobat class taking, basil lover in marketing. This is Davina's last week with us because they are moving on to another position as a marketer for the School and Library Marketing team at Macmillan's Children's Publishing Group. Davina, thanks for all the great work over the years. We'll miss you—and hearing about all your fabulous adventures—but we wish you well, and are thrilled you'll still be close by.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip-a-day book "The Grammar Daily." That's all. Thanks for listening.