Get out your skinny jeans and pass the PBR! Martha and Grant discuss the definition of the word hipster. Also, what happens when you pull a brodie? And why do we describe something cheap or poorly made as cheesy? Also, sawbucks, shoestring budgets, the origins of bootlegging, and cabbie lingo, including the slang word bingo.
Tags / linguistics
Tagged with “linguistics”
(86)
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What’s a Hipster? - A Way with Words, public radio’s lively language show
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A Roberta of Flax (full episode) - A Way with Words, public radio’s lively language show
We have collective nouns for animals, like “a gaggle of geese,” “a pride of lions,” and “an exaltation of larks.” So why not collective nouns for plants? How about a “greasing of palms,” or a “pursing of tulips”? Also, the difference between further and farther, the proper use of crescendo, how Shakespeare sounded, and why a child’s runny nose is sometimes referred to as lamb’s legs.
Tagged with language linguistics words collective nouns
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Strange Spelling Bee Words - A Way with Words, public radio’s lively language show
Why do spelling bees include such bizarre, obsolete words as cymotrichous? Why is New York called the Big Apple? Also, the stinky folk medicine tradition called an asifidity bag, the surprising number of common English phrases that come directly from the King James Bible, three sheets to the wind, the term white elephant, in like Flynn, Australian slang, and what to call foam sleeve for an ice-cold beverage can.
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All Sorts of Collective Nouns
Brian Suda interviews Drew Neil about the All Sorts project. They talk about the site’s origins and how it has grown. Brian recalls the Moo cards that were used to promote the site, and Drew talks of the recent exhibition of screen printed collective noun illustrations in Edinburgh’s Owl & Lion gallery.
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The man who hunts for anachronisms in Mad Men, Downton Abbey, and Edith Wharton. - Slate Magazine
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?…
Tagged with lexicon valley linguistics language mad men downton abbey
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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.
Tagged with lexicon valley linguistics language
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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.
Tagged with lexicon valley linguistics language
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Lexicon Valley: Why should we care if a language goes extinct? - Slate Magazine
By some estimates, approximately half of all languages currently alive on Earth will become extinct during this century. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000-plus tongues, many spoken by only tens or hundreds of people. But what exactly do we lose when a language dies without ever having been documented? Is it equivalent to, say, species extinction? Listen as Bob Garfield and I discuss the race to preserve what is arguably humanity’s most impressive achievement.
Tagged with lexicon valley linguistics language
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Lexicon Valley: Beginning and ending all of our thoughts with “so.” - Slate Magazine
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
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.