A couple of tricky fellows for you today – and ones that are often misspelled into the bargain. It’s two-for-one day at Word du Jour!
First up is one thing we can thank the artistes Bobby Brown and Britney Spears for (and if there are any others, it can’t be a very long list) their singing [...]

Patois, pronounced pat-waa or sometimes pat-waa-z, is generally held to mean any language that is non-standard. The best bet seems to be that it originated from the Old French Patoier, meaning “to handle clumsily”.
In English, a patois could be a regional dialect or a form of Pidgin English, such as the English spoken in parts [...]