Once again, I've taken a question about language that may not have posed itself to many people, and answered it through a deep dive into linguistic (pre)history. This latest piece brings my output up to 10,000 words for February alone, but it was necessary – not just to provide my dear reader with a full answer, but to help me reach the bedrock of what grammatical gender actually is.

This aspect of language, which millions of speakers (and writers) deftly compute every second, eludes easy definition and can be counterintuitive in its essential quality.

A journey into the Indo-European family of languages exemplifies this. For them, grammtical gender is and isn't connected to human gender. It is and it isn't a kind of categorisation for words. It is and it isn't audibly/visibly obvious from the form of a word.

So, the word count of ‘Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina: Why do so many women’s names end in A?’ is partly to help its author get his thoughts in order.