When we say "it's raining", what is the "it" that we're referring to? In fact, "it" doesn't exist - it's what's called a dummy or non-referential "it". Its function is grammatical rather than lexical.
 
"Grammatical" refers to meaning signalled by such things as word order and other devices like "s" to denote a plural. "Dog bites man" has the same words as "man bites dog", but the meaning of each sentence is different thanks to the different word order. That's grammar in action.
 
Every language has its own grammar. "Dog bites man" is a classic English subject-verb-object construction. Japanese, on the other hand, uses the subject-object-verb order - "man dog bites". In this respect, English is outvoted. In the 1980s, linguist Russell S. Tomlin reported that 45% of languages prefer the Japanese order, while "only" 42% prefer the English way. Hebrew, Irish and Zapotec opt for verb-subject-object - "bites man dog". Persian, Romanian and Finnish don't have a strict word order except in specific circumstances.
 
You might notice that every sentence above, regardless of word order, is in agreement about what each individual word means. "Man" means "man", no matter where you put it. This is what is meant by "lexical meaning", also called denotation, also called the dictionary meaning of words. "Bites man dog" is full of lexical meaning, even though the sentence itself is jibberish to an English speaker.
 
Which brings us back to the dummy or non-referential "it". It lacks lexical meaning - that is, it doesn't refer to anything "out there" in the world. But that doesn't make it empty. "It's raining" tells you something.
 
The dummy "it" behaves differently in different variations of English. In some creole languages such as Gullah, rather than say "there's a spider in the shower", a speaker would say "it's a spider in the shower", replacing the dummy "there" with a dummy "it".
 
Having defended the dummy words, now let me get out my shotgun for a moment. Because it requires so little thought, the dummy "there" is a common feature of weak writing. If your writing is stuffed with sentences like “there are five roads leading into the city”, you're placing a lot of empty words in your prose. One way to become more concise and energetic at the same time is to revise them to read “five roads lead into the city”.
 

Today's word is in honour of the remarkable 17-year-old Lydia Ko (left), who has just capped off her first season on the LPGA Tour by winning the CME Group Tour Championship and, with it, just under $2m in prize money. Oh yeah, she's also been named rookie of the year. Phenomenal!

I'd always assumed that links derived from the fact that the 18 holes on a golf course are linked, chain-like, in a predetermined sequence. But no. It turns out that links is a Scottish/Northumbrian term for undulating sandy ground, often near the sea. It comes from the  Old English hlinc, "rising ground, ridge". It was on this type of ground that the first games of golf in Scotland, home of this venerable game, were first played. 

I'll bet Lydia already knew that. The star.

Here's an experiment for any reader not sure of this word's meaning. From its sound alone, would you guess it to be a positive or a derogatory term? 

Did you plump for derogatory? It does sound kind of down-and-dirty, doesn't it? (When I asked my wife to guess the meaning, she said "something that gathers on the wheels of paddle steamers". Nice try - and slightly worrying at the same time, honey.)

Its actual meaning is "an ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole". Its origin is uncertain, but the commonly accepted story is that it was coined in 1962 by one Jackson W. Granholm (not a paddle steamer captain) in an article for computer magazine Datamation.

Synonyms include jury rigging, Heath Robinson and makeshift. Work-around, another computer-related term, isn't quite a synonym, as it refers to a solution that gets around a problem without actually fixing it. A kludge, on the other hand is a fix - of sorts.

One theory says the word's derived from the German adjective klug, meaning "smart" or "witty". In which case, someone's being ironic. Personally, I hear resonances of words like fudge, clubbed (together), smudge and glugged (up). If my theory's correct, that makes kludge a cousin to words like smoosh (a combination of squash, mash and mush).

That would also put kludge in a class of words called phonesthemes, where a particular sound or sound sequence suggests a certain meaning. You can hear it in words like glisten, glimmer and glare, where the "gl" sound suggests vision. Think also of the abundance of words with "sn" at the start (snicker, snort, sniff, snore, etc) that refer to nasal functions and noises.

From the "there's a name for that too" file comes the phrase "contrastive reduplication".

Let's start with bog standard, garden variety reduplication, which you charmed your parents with as a child, you little monkey. Examples include choo-choo, yum-yum, and moo-moo. Pretty self explanatory, yes?

Contrastive reduplication is the adult version of this game. It's when you're inviting friends over for lunch and you say, "We'll make a tuna salad and you bring a salad salad."

In the words of a Boston University academic, contrastive reduplication is "a kind of clarifying construction that usually means something like 'the prototypical thing, not one of the slightly non-prototypical things one might otherwise have called by this name.' "

No? Then try this two-minute clip of comedian Micky Flanagan. It'll clear things up.