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Linguist Geoff Nunberg on the practice of giving names to military operations, like the misconceived Operation Infinite Justice that was pulled from use.
When Sarah Palin used the word "refudiate," she took a lot of flak -- both for saying she coined the word deliberately and then comparing herself to Shakespeare. Linguist Geoff Nunberg says political slips and errors aren't half as interesting as the way people react to them.
Linguist Geoff Nunberg says everyone's using the phrase "we're broke" these days to justify cuts in government programs and services. But what does "we're broke" actually mean? The answer, says Nunberg, is tricker than you think.
Linguist Geoff Nunberg has a commentary on the idea of community. A controversial recent book by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam argues that community participation is in sharp decline in American life, but Nunberg says the word “community” is being used more frequently than ever.
It takes one to know one: Linguist Geoff Nunberg discusses the apolitical, prosaic prowess of the late New York Times conservative wordsmith, William Safire.
The only literary work about punctuation I'm aware of is an odd early story by Anton Chekhov called "The Exclamation Mark." After getting into an argument with a colleague about punctuation, a school inspector named Yefim Perekladin asks his wife what an exclamation point is for. She tells him it signifies delight, indignation, joy and rage. He realizes that in 40 years of writing official reports, he has never had the need to express any of those emotions.
Language commentator Geoff Nunberg reflects on how changing modes of speech in motion pictures signify a character's personal transformation. The 1938 version of Pygmalion is a great example -- but the trope can be found in several other films.
