Have you noticed the seemingly stratospheric rise of the word “so” in recent years? People use it not only as a conjunction or an intensifying adverb—as in “That’s so awesome!”—but also to begin or end sentences in a manner pregnant with implied meaning. So … Bob Garfield and I set out to determine what this sort of “so” might in fact be accomplishing. http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/04/lexicon_valley_beginning_and_ending_all_of_our_thoughts_with_so_.html
Tags / bob garfield
Tagged with “bob garfield”
(7)
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Lexicon Valley: Beginning and ending all of our thoughts with “so.” - Slate Magazine
Tagged with linguistics grammar lexicon valley bob garfield language english
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Lexicon Valley: Webster’s Third, the most controversial dictionary ever published. - Slate Magazine
In the early 1960s, amid a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, a burgeoning civil rights movement here at home, and a dawning countercultural revolution, America’s intellectual class was in an utter freak out over a dictionary. That’s right, the 1961 publication of Webster’s Third Edition incited otherwise sober-minded newspaper and magazine writers to declare nothing less than the end of the world. Bob Garfield and I talk to author David Skinner about his forthcoming book, The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published.
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Lexicon Valley: Why we keep saying “between you and I.” - Slate Magazine
Do you flinch when someone says “between you and I”? Textbook English tells us it’s ungrammatical, and yet it’s arguably more common than the officially sanctioned “between you and me.” Tennessee Williams, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare—all were guilty of using “I” when the sentence cried out for “me.” Or maybe they weren’t so guilty after all. Bob Garfield and I discuss the oft-uttered, much-maligned “between you and I.”
Tagged with linguistics grammar lexicon valley bob garfield language english
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Lexicon Valley: Why we think we can’t end a sentence with a preposition. - Slate Magazine
We all learned you’re not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition. But from where did this alleged rule come? And why does it encumber us with such labored sentences as the one preceding this? In the first episode of Slate’s new language program Lexicon Valley, producer Mike Vuolo and On the Media co-host Bob Garfield explore the history of the terminal preposition rule, and whether there are good reasons to follow it.
Tagged with linguistics grammar lexicon valley bob garfield language english
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Lexicon Valley: resolving authorship controversies in the federalist papers and the wizard of oz - Slate Magazine
Listen to Lexicon Valley Episode No. 14: “By Their Words You Shall Know Them.” Subscribe in iTunes ∙ RSS feed ∙ Download ∙ Play in another tab Is it possible that your writing style is identifiably unique? In the late 1800s, a Polish philosopher named Wincenty Lutosławski imagined a “future science of stylometry,”…
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Lexicon Valley: The role of language in Scrabble. - Slate Magazine
Does Scrabble in fact celebrate language? Or does it merely reduce English to a set of mathematical symbols and probability calculations? In the final episode of our first series of Lexicon Valley podcasts, I talk to Word Freak author and competitive Scrabble player Stefan Fatsis about how a math game disguised as a word game nevertheless unlocks the essential beauty of the English language.
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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…