Language

Linguist Geoff Nunberg tells us his word of the year, and why he chose it.

With all our texting, tweeting and social media posting, billions of people are using typed words for the kind everyday communication that used to happen more often in conversation. A new book argues that we’ve created a unique new language to reproduce the shades of meaning that we used to convey verbally. Our linguist Geoff Nunberg reflects on the new rules of language that he calls chat-speak.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the use of gender-neutral pronouns.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the word 'algorithm.'

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the word 'socialism" which has gone from the fringes of American political discourse to the forefront of the national conversation.

Dreyer gets the final say over questions related to grammar, style and clarity at Random House. Now he's sharing his writing advice in the new book Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.

Seven-year-old Jakelin Caal died in U.S. custody in December. Linguist Geoff Nunberg says her death might have been prevented had border agents spoken the Mayan language Q'eqchi'.

President Trump has a penchant for breathing new life into expressions with troubled pasts, like "America first" and "enemy of the people." It's not likely his uses of those phrases will survive his presidency. But he may have altered the political lexicon more enduringly at a Houston rally two weeks before the elections, when he proclaimed himself a "nationalist" and urged his supporters to use the word.

In his essay "On Liars," philosopher Michel de Montaigne famously wrote that the truth has a single face, while its opposite has "a hundred thousand faces."

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the origins of the term "deep state."