Enter Linguist Geoff Nunberg on the epic Anglo-Saxon poem "Beowulf" -- which is considered to be the origin of English literature and which has been newly translated by poet Seamus Heaney.
Wikipedia editor Bryan Henderson has made it his crusade to edit out the phrase "comprised of" in more than 5 million articles. While his quest is harmless, it shows that zealots can dominate the Web.
Whether it's logs of phone calls or GPS data, commentator Geoff Nunberg says it still says a lot about who you are: "Tell me where you've been and who you've been talking to, and I'll tell you about your politics, your health, your sexual orientation, your finances," he says.
When dictionaries add trendy words like "twerk," they're prioritizing the fleeting language habits of the young, says Geoff Nunberg. And our fascination with novel words tends to eclipse subtle changes in the meanings of old ones -- "which are often more consequential."
Linguist Geoff Nunberg says that, regardless of the language they're written in, newspaper headlines demand a mastery of colloquialisms and pre-existing knowledge of current events--making them difficult for non-native speakers to comprehend.
When The Associated Press said it would no longer condemn the use of the adverb "hopefully" in its style guide, most people shrugged. But the announcement was a red flag to people who have made the adverb the biggest bugaboo of English usage over the past 50 years.
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 Geoffrey Nunberg tells us about endangered languages. Some will naturally die based on changing ways of living, while others are actively repressed.
The flap over the Kentucky senator's articles and speeches is just the latest in a series of cases of plagiarism by high-profile journalists and politicians. Linguist Geoff Nunberg looks at the way the word plagiarism has been used since it was invented by the Romans and wonders if it's always immoral or just bad form.
Linguist Geoff Nunberg reflects on the evolution of World Wide Web naming conventions, such as attaching "e" or "cyber" in front of everything Internet.
Analysts wondered if Barack Obama's speech on race in Philadelphia last month was the beginning of a "national conversation" on the subject. Meanwhile, Fresh Air's contributing linguist Geoff Nunberg is wondering what, exactly, a "national conversation" is — and when we started talking about them.
In his new book, Ascent of the A-Word, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg looks at how the term took root among griping World War II GIs — and how its meaning evolved in the '60s and '70s. He tells Fresh Air that crude words are "wonderfully revealing."
