Q. I am a native French speaker who lived in the US for a while. I have always heard and pronounced the word grocery as \GROH-shree\. I am accustomed to working with pronouncing dictionaries, but none of them have, in the past, given the \GROH-shree\ pronunciation. Only recently have I noticed this as an alternative pronunciation in the online M-W dictionary. Is there a story behind this?

A. This pronunciation variant of grocery appears to be relatively recent. We have only had it in our dictionaries since 1993. However, it is widespread. You are most likely to hear this variant in rapid casual speech. It is unlikely that anyone speaking in a slow or deliberate manner would use this variant. The variant likely comes about due to the loss of the vowel in the second syllable. Once the vowel in the second syllable is lost (from \GROH-suh-ree\), we end up with \GROH-sree\ or, as you know, \GROH-shree\.

Q. We got talking about all the rooms of a house: living room, bedroom, bathroom, dining room: everything is a "room" but the kitchen! Where did this word come from and what is its definition?

A. Kitchen derives from the Middle English word kichene, from the Old English cycene, and can be traced back to the Late Latin coquina. Coquina, in turn, is from the Latin verb coquere, meaning "to cook." (Coquere is also related to the same very old word that led to the English cook, as it happens.) Kitchen is also defined as "a place (as a room) with cooking facilities; the personnel that prepares, cooks, and serves food; and synonymous with cuisine." As to why it isn't known as a "kitchen room," we can both blame it on the vagaries of our language and point out kitchen has company in the similarly stand-alone parlor, and den.

Q. In the "TV Time" section of our local newspaper, noon is labeled 12 P.M. and midnight is labeled 12 A.M., times which don't exist. I found the same labeling in Court TV's "Court TV Schedule," which appears on the Web. Am I seeing errors or a change in usage?

A. Although some people claim that (technically speaking) there is "no such thing as 12 AM or 12 PM," many people have extended the convention in a straightforward manner. For example, if one minute after noon is 12:01 PM, then logically the preceding minute must be 12:00 PM.

The question of whether this is an error or change in usage is a little bit harder to answer. Many changes in usage start out labeled as errors, until more people are using the new form than the old. In this case, there are certainly still people who would consider this an error, but at the same time there are a lot of folks who employ this usage without a second thought. This could be called a usage shift, although more detailed research would be warranted before making a firm statement.