Better paragraph breaks. The story behind 'mad money' and 'pin money.' Bruce bad.
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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.

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 to end with summary sentences. Such a topic sandwich filled with sub-points, supporting sentences, and examples lends itself to formulaic writing.

This strategy of tell them what you're 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 isn't about taking 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 pinprick that wakes up readers 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. Rafi Kachidourian does this in his essay, The Tastemakers, writing about the flavor industry.

Contradorian 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, quote, refused to discuss the matter, unquote. The next paragraph opens with the broader point, quote, such secrecy helps shape the story of our food, unquote.

Had Catedorian ended his previous paragraph with that line, it would have been 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 Urofsky's The Language of Food. In one paragraph, Urofsky explains the early technology of distillation, its perfection by Arabic and Persian scientists, and its geographic spread.

The next paragraph opens with a sharper linguistic point that, quote, all this history, of course, is there in the words, unquote. Katchadourian and Yurovsky let their examples sink in for a moment before telling us why they're significant. A paragraph can also end in a jump cut, an image or idea that occurs in a slightly different form later. Writer Louis 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's a story he suggests of the violation of domestic taboos. The paragraph that follows segues neatly from literary analysis to Seuss's biography.

Menand begins the paragraph with the sentence, quote, 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, unquote. The reader is hooked.

On occasion two, 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 diminution, the untenable self, and the burdens of autonomous existence.

His next paragraph drives the point home. Quote, the true believer is eternally incomplete, eternally insecure. Unquote. We often read for information and for story. We sometimes pause to enjoy great sentences, fresh images, and lyricism. But 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's 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.

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unlimited access to 25 language courses for life. Visit rosettastone.com slash pod 50 to get started and claim your 50% off today. Don't miss out. Go to rosettastone.com slash pod 50 and start learning today. 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, quote, 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, unquote.

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 money 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 Engrams, 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 and Times Democrat in 1922. That's Lima, Ohio. It read, quote, the 1922 girl always squirrels or hides a few dollar bills known as mad money, unquote.

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 have 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 fair 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 or 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 every 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.

So the 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.

That segment was by Karen Lundy, 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 chanterellestoriestudio.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 Fissy 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're 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 started 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 Susie 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 Clemons 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? 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-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 emergency scale. That's great.

If you want to share the story of your family act, a word or phrase that you only use with your friends or family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 833214GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp. And if you want the numbers or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.

Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Nat Hoops in marketing, Dan Fireobb in audio, Brandon Getchis, director of podcasts, Holly Hutchings in digital operations, Morgan Christensen in advertising, and an extra special thank you this week to Davina Tomlin, who you know is our hiking, belly dancing, circus acrobat, class-taking, basal lover in marketing.

This is Davina's last week with us because they're 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 that you'll still be close by. And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip of day book, The Grammar Daily. That's all. Thanks for listening.

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