I like myriad 10,000 Maniacs songs—”These Are Days,” “Candy Everybody Wants,” “Few and Far Between,” and probably more that I can’t think of right now. But should I really use “myriad” to describe just a few songs like this? 

First, the reason I’m telling you about my love for 10,000 Maniacs is that the word “myriad” is derived from the Greek word for “10,000.” 

Second, the word has long since come to have a meaning beyond specifically 10,000. Today, it means “a whole bunch,” “an uncountable multitude,” or “something with an innumerable variety” so it’s hard to argue that “myriad” is a good way to describe three or four songs. “Various,” “a few,” or “many” would probably be better choices.

‘A Myriad of’ or Just ‘Myriad?

Another hot debate is whether it is correct to say, “Disneyland has myriad delights” or “Disneyland has a myriad of delights.” You commonly hear “a myriad of” and just as commonly hear people railing that it should be simply “myriad” because the word is an adjective and essentially equivalent to a number. The argument goes like this: You wouldn’t say, “There are a ten thousand of delights,” so you shouldn’t say, “There are a myriad of delights.”

Believe it or not, most language experts say that either way is fine. “Myriad” was actually used as a noun in English long before it was used as an adjective, and Merriam-Webster says the criticism the word gets as a noun is “recent.” Further, Garner’s Modern English Usage says “a myriad of” is fine even though it’s less efficient than “myriad.” Language is about more than efficiency, after all!  

Today, “myriad” is used as both a noun and an adjective, which means it can be used with an “a” before it (as a noun, “a myriad” just as you would say “a mouse”) or without an “a” before it (as an adjective, “myriad delights” just as you would say “delicious treats”).

Nevertheless, if you choose to say or write “a myriad of,” I have to warn you that you’ll encounter occasional but vehement resistance. And in fact, the AP…

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A listener named Elizabeth wrote, “Would you please [cover] the proper use of ‘stint’ and ‘stent’? I’m so sick of people asking about the three ‘stints’ in one of my arteries that I really believe my head will explode the next time it happens.”

Well, we wouldn’t want that to happen!

When I started doing research, both of these words surprised me.

‘Stint’

In my whole life, I’ve only heard “stint” used to mean something like “an assignment” or “a set amount of time,” as in “I did a stint as a sail maker in Seattle, but it didn’t suit me,” or “Little Joey did a three-year stint in the big house.” But “stint” has actually been used in English since the 1300s and has had many other meanings.

It comes from an Old English word that means “to make blunt or dull,” and most of the meanings seem to be somehow related to limits or restrictions. For example, it can be a verb that means “to be frugal or cheap,” as in “Can you pick up groceries on your way home? And don’t stint on the ice cream. I want the good stuff.”

Still, searching both Google Books and the Corpus of Contemporary American English shows that even though throughout the ages it’s had many other meanings, the use I had heard of is vastly more common today, so I’m probably not the only one who thought that was the only meaning. It’s safe to say that today, you use “stint” to describe a bit of time: a stint in rehab, a stint as a driver for a celebrity, or a stint as a visiting professor at Oxford.

‘Stent’

“Stent” surprised me in both a similar and a different way. “Stent” has also been an English word since the 1300s, but the Oxford English Dictionary says nearly all its old uses are now obsolete except in Scottish. 

The use you’re most likely to encounter today—the type of stent Elizabeth has in her arteries—is named after a person, a 19th-century dentist: Charles Stent! But he is known for inventing improved dentures, so how did the little tubes that keep your arteries open, and really now keep all kinds of tubes in our bodies open, come to be named after him?

Well, an article in the “Journal of the History of Dentistry” says it goes back to plastic surgery during World War I. Apparently, a lot of soldiers got face wounds when they popped up from the trenches to fire on the enemy, so doctors found themselves trying new methods to repair this kind of damage that they hadn’t seen much of…

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A  few years ago, I was listening to the Range podcast made by two of my friends—Julia Ritchey and Amy Westervelt. It’s a great show about life in the West, and this particular episode was about the controversies surrounding coyote hunting, but about halfway through the podcast, I noticed that people were pronouncing “coyote” two different ways: the three syllable “coyote” and the two-syllable “coyote.” Here are two clips:

Julia Ritchie (podcast host): After their first petition to get a coyote hunting ban failed, they tried again in November of last year, and about 40 people spoke. I tallied it up. (3:51-3:57)

Fred Knowlton (a retired professor who studied coyotes for 40 years): Personally, I don’t believe any of the coyote hunting expeditions by the general public are effective in reducing coyote numbers. (6:42-6:52)

I did some research and didn’t find anything definitive, and then I put the question out to the Grammar Girl Facebook page, and got more than 1,800 responses, which is why it’s nearly three years later that I’ve gone through all the comments, made a map, and am now telling you about it. Wow. Thanks for all that! I didn’t word the question in a way that makes this a scientific study, but 1,800 responses certainly rivals things I’ve seen published in journals.

Since then I’ve also done more research, so here’s what I found.

Many Ways to Pronounce ‘Coyote’

There are actually more than two different ways to pronounce it. You have “kai-oat-ee” and “kai-oat,” which you heard in the clips, but then some people pronounce it with a little bit of a different ending—“kai-oat-eh”—and people honoring the Spanish origin or who live near the Mexican border in the United States might pronounce it the Spanish way: “coy-yoh-tay.” And the Cambridge Dictionary says the British pronunciation is “coy-oh-tee.” So we can safely say there are at least five—five—different pronunciations that people are regularly using to describe this animal, and I bet there are some I haven’t even found. And that’s just in current times.

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