Why Product Brand Names Don't Mean What They Used To.

Commentator Geoff Nunberg considers brand names. They make up a significant proportion of the average person's vocabulary. Nunberg says the English language is being privatized.

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.