Ask any lexicographer who has been at this gig for a while what word had them hunched over their cubicle at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday, hands clutched to their temples, the office copy of Quirk open on their desk while the night janitor loudly scrummed with the big recycling bin, and the answer will not be a polysyllabic hummer like “sesquipedalian.” The answer will be “but,” “like,” “as.” They are sly shape-shifters that often live between parts of speech; they are the ones you will keep coming back to throughout your career to parse and re-parse, the ones that will give you a handful of uses that
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