Last summer Kim Kardashian, who already had a daughter called North (surname West), announced that she was expecting a boy. She put a photograph on Twitter of herself pouting, captioning it: ‘Pregnancy lips’. Some Twitter-followers asked: ‘Pregnancy lips? Is that even a thing?’
The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary has since adopted that example as the locus classicus of the phrase Is that even a thing?, and variants such as Is that a thing? or That’s not a thing.
Professor Ben Yagoda of the University of Delaware has...
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