Language

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

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.

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."

"Great Britain and the United States are two nations separated by a common language." That's the stock witticism, but if you ask me, it gets things backwards. Great Britain and the U.S. are more like two nations united by a divided language — or more precisely, by their mutual obsession with their linguistic differences. For 200 years now, writers from each nation have been tirelessly picking over the language of the other, with a mix of amusement, condescension, derision and horror.

It's word-of-the-year time again. Collins Dictionary chose "Fake news" and Dictionary.com went with "complicit." Others have proposed #metoo, "alternative facts," "take a knee," "resistance" and "snowflake."