Grammar Girl here.
I'm Inyan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today, in honor of Halloween, we're going to talk about ghostly words and phrases.
And then we'll look at the difference between the words between and among.
I started thinking about ghost phrases for Halloween and I was surprised how many of them there are.
I thought of a lot myself, and then, when I started searching, I found even more, and I love some of the stories.
Let's start with my favorite, ghost words.
These are dictionary entries created entirely by mistake.
Back in 2019, I did a whole episode about them.
That's episode 734, if you want the full story.
But here's a quick example.
The word doored appeared in Webster's New International Dictionary for years, defined as density.
But doored isn't a real word at all.
It was supposed to be an abbreviation entry for density that read D or D, capital D or lowercase d. But someone who worked on the entry misread it as a word spelled D-O-R-D, and thus Doord was born.
This was in 1934.
A sharp-eyed editor discovered the error in 1939 and a correction note was sent to the printer, but Doard wasn't completely exercised until 1947.
But let's move on to some more common ghost phrases.
When your car finally gives up the ghost.
You're using a phrase that works for both death and broken machines.
If you look white as a ghost or like you've seen a ghost, you're visibly shaken or pale.
And if something doesn't have a ghost of a chance, well, it has virtually no chance at all.
And if the detective's boss in your favorite police procedural tells the star to stop chasing ghosts?
The boss thinks your hero is wasting time chasing something that doesn't exist.
But we all know from experience that the detective will be vindicated in the end.
A ghost town is a place that's been deserted.
It could be a literal town, but you can also use the phrase metaphorically, like wow, it was a ghost town at the mall this afternoon.
And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention one of my favorite recent familects in which Sherry from Florida recounted a family vacation to an amusement park called Ghost Town in the Sky. where one person got so mad at someone else that they have memorialized the fight by using it to gauge the level of anger, asking, are you mad or are you ghost town mad?
Transportation has at least two types of ghost rides.
A ghost train can be a haunted house ride, but there's also a fascinating British railway concept.
In the UK some train services run at minimum frequency, sometimes just once a week, purely to avoid the cost of formally closing a route or station.
They're called ghost trains because they barely exist.
Sometimes, companies don't even run the train.
They substitute a bus instead.
And ghost flights are a similar thing.
Apparently, airlines sometimes fly mostly empty planes just to keep their airport slots.
Sounds wasteful.
And speaking of waste, let's talk about the workplace.
A ghost employee is someone on the payroll who doesn't actually work there, usually someone with a family or a personal connection to a manager.
It's payroll fraud, and auditors specifically look for this practice.
Ghost kitchens are a relatively new development.
These are restaurants that only do delivery or takeout with no dine-in option.
You order online from what seems like a restaurant, but there's no actual restaurant space for customers.
And here's something that seems particularly cruel, ghost jobs.
These are job postings for positions that don't really exist.
Why do companies post them?
Well, sometimes to gauge interest, sometimes to make the company look like it's growing, or sometimes just to keep a pipeline of resumes.
But imagine spending hours on an application for a job that was never real in the first place.
It's outrageous.
And you want to stick a ghost on people who do that.
And some people think you might find ghosts in the theater.
In addition to the superstition about not saying the name of the play Macbeth in a theater, actors sometimes call it the Scottish play instead.
Theaters also usually employ a ghost light—a single bulb left shining on an empty stage even overnight.
For practical reasons.
It's there so people don't trip and hurt themselves in a dark theater—but But there's also a superstition that theaters house ghosts and you need to leave a light on for them.
Here's another fun one for people who love music.
Ghost tracks are unlisted, hidden songs on albums or CDs.
Remember when Nirvana put Endless Nameless at the end of Nevermind after 10 minutes of silence?
And this is pretty cool.
Before CDs, people could make double grooved records where the needle might catch different grooves and play different content, which some people think of as hidden tracks.
Monty Python's matching tie and handkerchief was made this way, on one side, and is sometimes called a three-sided record.
Sticking with the arts, we have ghostwriters, people who write for someone else without credit.
I actually interviewed Dan Gerstein of Gotham Ghostwriters back in April for episode 1056 and there's a lot more to learn about that industry if you're interested in the world of invisible writers.
Moving on to the digital world, ghost terminology is easy to find here too.
Ghost mode is a privacy setting that hides your location or status, like in Snapchat, but it's also become a more general term for stepping back from social media or social life to focus on work, school or personal goals.
Someone might say, I'm going ghost mode for finals week.
And you're probably familiar with the idea of ghosting someone, completely stopping communication without a warning or explanation.
But there are older uses of the term, too.
In analog television, ghosting meant seeing a double image from signal interference.
And in offset printing.
Ghosting is a defect where faint replicas of images appear where they shouldn't.
The phrase ghost in the machine describes an unexplained technical glitch or mysterious system element.
And that phrase always reminds me of a book I enjoyed called Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick, the notorious computer hacker from the 70s, 80s and 90s.
That man had some absolutely wild stories.
Sports also have their own ghostly terminology.
A ghost runner is an automatic runner placed on second base in extra innings, which is meant to make it easier for teams to score or to help shorten long games.
And a ghost goal is a disputed score in soccer, where the ball may or may not have fully crossed the line.
The phrase ghost goal actually came from Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho after a 2005 Champions League semi-final against Liverpool.
His quote about a controversial goal that may not have fully crossed the line gave us this now common sports term.
In the environment.
Ghost nets or ghost gear are abandoned fishing equipment that continues trapping and killing marine life.
These nets can drift through the ocean for years, creating ongoing devastation.
And ghost forests are stands of dead trees, usually from saltwater intrusion or land drop.
A few years ago I was researching areas near the Cascadia subduction zone because we were thinking of moving there, and I learned about the spooky ghost forests related to that massive earthquake zone.
When land suddenly drops during a major quake, saltwater rushes in and kills entire forests.
The dead trees remain standing as eerie reminders of the catastrophic geological events.
So there you have it.
Ghost words in dictionaries ghost employees on payrolls, ghost trains barely running, ghost tracks hiding on your favorite albums and more.
I love how we take this one spooky concept and apply it to everything from technical glitches to fraudulent employees, to hidden songs.
They all capture the original idea of what a ghost is, something that isn't really or fully there or maybe shouldn't be.
Next, we're going to talk about the difference between the words between and among.
You may have noticed that I said we're going to talk about the difference between the words between and among.
I used the word between because I was talking about a choice that involves two distinct words.
Many people believe between is just for choices that involve two items, and among is for choices that involve more than two items.
That can get you to the right answer some of the time, but it's not quite that simple.
Here's the deal.
You can use the word between when you're talking about distinct individual items, even if there are more than two of them.
For example, you could say she chose between Harvard, Brown and Yale because the colleges are individual things.
The Chicago Manual of Style describes these as one-to-one relationships.
Sometimes they're between two items, groups, or people, as in these examples.
Choose between squiggly and aardvark.
Let's keep this between you and me.
Other times they can be between more than two items, groups, or people, as in these examples.
The negotiations between the cheerleaders, the dance squad and the flag team were going well, despite the confetti incident.
The differences between English, Chinese, and Arabic are significant.
On the other hand, you use among when you're talking about things that aren't distinct items or individuals.
For example, if you were talking about colleges collectively, you could say she chose among the Ivy League schools.
If you're talking about a group of people, you also use among.
Excitement spread among the fans in the arena.
The scandal caused a division among the employees.
Squiggly and Aardvark are among the residents featured in the newsletter.
Among can also indicate that someone is part of a group or left out of a group, as in these examples.
He was glad to find a friend among enemies.
She felt like a stranger among friends.
Between and among can also tell the reader different things about location or direction.
Think about the difference between these two examples.
Squiggly walked between the trees.
Squiggly walked among the trees.
Squiggly walked between the trees gives you the idea that he stayed on the path.
He either walked between two trees or was on a route that was surrounded by trees.
On the other hand, Squiggly walked among the trees gives you more of an idea that he wandered around a park or forest.
He may have had an end point in mind, but it doesn't sound as if he went from point A to point B on a defined path.
So remember, between is the word you want for two choices, but it has other uses too.
Finally, I have a familect story.
Hi, Mignon.
This is Kyanne McMilley from Phoenix, Arizona, and I have a familex to share.
One day my husband and I were having some friends coming over for dinner and we had cooked all day.
The kitchen floor was a disaster, but we didn't have time to come up.
So my husband took a white rag and wiped up the floor and the worst of the floor mess anyway.
And when he picked up the rag, there was the imprint of his hand on the rag, like the handprint on the volleyball in the movie Castaway.
So we started calling wiping up the floor Wilsoning.
And we still say, I'm going to Wilson the floor when it needs a touch up.
Anyway, that's our FAMILAC.
Thanks for a great podcast.
You are so appreciated.
Aw, I love movie familects.
Thanks, Kayanne.
If you want to share the story of your familect a special word or phrase you use with your family or a friendilect, leave a message on the voicemail line at 83-321-4GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
Thanks to Morgan Christensen in advertising, Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts, Nat Hoops in marketing, Dan Feierabend in audio and Rebecca Sebastian in marketing, who has a dog named Sherlock.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of The Grammar Daily, a book of tips, illustrations and puzzles that makes a great gift.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
