For period dramas like Downton Abbey and Mad Men, historical authenticity is crucial to the viewer experience. Vigilant designers work from photos to accurately recreate everything from kitchenware to hairstyles. But what about the dialogue?…
The man who hunts for anachronisms in Mad Men, Downton Abbey, and Edith Wharton. - Slate Magazine
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Lexicon Valley: Seeking a gender neutral alternative to he and she. - Slate Magazine
In the third and final installment of our Lexicon Valley series about language and gender, Bob Garfield and I discuss the ongoing quest for a single, more equitable alternative to “he” and “she.” Since at least the 1850s, English speakers have made many unsuccessful attempts to introduce an epicene pronoun into the language. But University of Michigan professor Anne Curzan argues that we don’t need such a word, since we already have a perfectly acceptable, if controversial, alternative—just use “they.” Don’t like that solution? Maybe she’ll convince you.
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Lexicon Valley: How grammatical gender changes our thinking, and how English lost its genders. - Slate Magazine
Does talking about an object as masculine or feminine somehow cause us to think of it that way? In the second part of a Lexicon Valley series about language and gender, Bob Garfield and I discuss the fascinating research by Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky involving grammar and perception. We talk also about what may have happened to grammatical gender in English. That’s right, once upon a time we had grammatical gender too. But then we lost it.
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Lexicon Valley: What it means for a language to have grammatical gender. - Slate Magazine
Listen to Lexicon Valley Episode No. 8: When Nouns Grew Genitals Subscribe in iTunes ∙ RSS feed ∙ Download ∙ Play in another tab ∙ Play in Stitcher Languages all across the world have what’s called grammatical gender, which means simply that nouns get divvied up into different categories or “classes.” Sometimes those…