Generate the answer for a given question. The question requires common knowledge of English. Make sure that the answer is in detail, long, consistent with the context, and requires general knowledge of English. To be less repetitive, please vary your language for each question. Give a proper explanation to answer, and if necessary, provide the definition of various terms. And conclude your answer if it's long. If you have used other resources (e.g., Merriam Webster's.) to answer the question, include citations in your answer. You don't need to paraphrase the context of your resources, but make sure that your answer is consistent and complete.
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Question: I know that Sussex and Middlesex are in England. It looks to me as if there is a pattern in names. What does the suffix -sex mean? Where does it come from?.

Answer: The -sex suffix is from Anglo-Saxon / Old English, with the actual meaning being 'Saxon'. Sussex is essentially 'South Saxon'. Middlesex is 'Middle Saxon'. Essex is 'East Saxon'. Wessex is 'West Saxon'. Most of the wiki pages for these places will have the toponymy definition.


Question: A friend posed the following word puzzle to me: Can you think of a sentence that keeps the same meaning whether you use 'it's' or 'its'? He asserted that this puzzle does in fact have a solution. However, it has me completely stumped. I tried to solve an easier problem, to find a sentence which is still grammatical if you change an 'its' to 'it's', but all I could come up with is examples like 'It's light!' (which is, strictly, more of a sentence fragment). What is the solution to the word puzzle? Or, is there some way I can 'prove' that the puzzle should have no solution?.

Answer: I gather from previous answers that there are two ways in which this question can goeither we interpret it strictly, and don't make assumptions about what it's asking, or we interpret it loosely. If we interpret it loosely, we can bend the rules a bit: As in the Hans Adler's answer, which I was picking on earlier, we can interpret 'same meaning' more loosely. In this case, the solution works well (and I'm sure there are more that work even better) wherein one sentence indicates that you see the tree's apples, and one indicates you see that the fruit which the tree bears is the apple. We can also use a construction (I took this idea from another answer) like: 'I cannot comprehend it's red.' = 'I cannot comprehend its red.' A sneaky solution can be to put 'its' and 'it's' in quotes in the sentence, to come up with something like: 'I wrote a sentence with 'it's' and 'its' in it.' = 'I wrote a sentence with 'its' and 'it's' in it.' We can spell something incorrectly, as Hans Adler ironically points out in the most downvoted answer. Or, as my girlfriend suggested, we can replace the 'it' in the contraction 'it's' with a proper noun (like that clever guy Stephen King did), making 'it's' refer to something that belongs to someone or something named It. In this case the solution becomes again trivial, since 'its' is also a possessive. 'This clown is named It. It's nose is red.' = 'This clown is named It. Its nose is red' (we sadly, in the last case, refer to a clown as an object, but it does have the same meaning) Alternatively All of these answers, to me, are trivial and make the puzzle somewhat boring. If we don't want the puzzle to be boring, we can't cut corners. In this case, as a few have pointed out, it is most likely impossible.


Question: I recently had somebody tell me that a mutual friend of ours who is genderqueer prefers that people refer to him/her using the gender-indefinite pronoun they. In some cases, this almost seems okay: Kris left their umbrella at our house. On the other hand, if Kris is sitting right next to you, it feels very odd to say They (meaning just Kris) would like more cake. Or even odder, Kris would like some more cake, can you please pass it to they/them?' Are these usages grammatically correct? Are they in the process of becoming grammatically correct? Are there more correct alternatives?.

Answer:
I think the reason for your friend's preference is that using either the male or female pronouns implicitly pigeon-holes the person in question as either one or the other. However, all of the examples you give seem to me to be forced, and to shout out loud 'Hey, look at how sensitive I'm being! I'm not calling Kris either male or female!' There are sensible alternatives to all of these examples that do not break any grammatical rules. 'Kris left their umbrella at our house' : Kris left an umbrella at our house (yes, it could technically then be somebody else's umbrella that was left behind, but would you really know?) 'They [Kris] would like more cake.' : Kris would like some more cake. 'Kris would like some more cake, can you please pass it to they?' : Could you please pass the cake? Kris would like some more. While my dictionary (Chambers 1990) does have a secondary definition of 'they' as 'he or she', it also says that this usage is 'with pl. verb', as in 'there are lots of people; they are happy'. 'They is' would not be correct.