ARCHIVE:
Lexicon Valley
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Do You Creak?
Listen to Slate’s show about the much-reviled phenomenon, prominent among young American women, of “creaky voice.”
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Why Fiscal Cliff Is Such a Powerful Metaphor
Listen to Slate’s show about the ubiquity of spatial metaphors in our language.
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Talking Leaves and Lightning Paper
The illiterate Cherokee man who invented the alphabet for his language.
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From “Wetbacks” to “Illegals” to “Undocumented” to … ?
Listen to Slate’s show about the heated debate over language at the heart of U.S. immigration policy.
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How Jews Grew Horns
Listen to Slate’s show about the all-important role that language translation (and mistranslation) plays in our lives.
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Malapropisms: the Pineapple of Linguistic Errors
What misspeaking might reveal about the way our mental dictionary is organized.
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Are Some Languages “Faster” Than Others?
Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo discuss the widespread belief that other languages are spoken more rapidly than your own.
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Who You Callin’ A**hole?
Slate’s show about Geoffrey Nunberg’s new book Ascent of the A-Word, now with transcripts.
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Should We Care When a Language Dies?
Listen to Slate’s show about what we stand to lose when a language goes extinct.
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Talking About the Past in the Present Tense
Listen to Slate’s show about Seinfeld’s masterful use of a time-honored narrative technique.
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Does Your Writing Style Have a Fingerprint?
Listen to Slate’s show about the surprising way mathematicians can determine authorship.
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“Lord Grantham, Don Draper’s on Hold”
The algorithm that finds anachronisms in Downton Abbey, Mad Men, and Edith Wharton.
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Was Honest Abe a Poet?
How Lincoln’s speaking style evolved from overly ornate to the brilliant simplicity of Gettysburg.
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“The House is Building”?
Why you never learned the passival tense, even though it used to be proper English grammar.
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For He/She’s a Jolly Bad Pronoun
Listen to Slate’s show about whether English needs a gender-neutral alternative.
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How English Lost Its Genders
Listen to Slate’s show about how a simple quirk of grammar may affect the way we think.
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When Nouns Grew Genitals
Listen to Slate’s show about what it means for language to have gender.
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The Meaning of Scrabble
Listen to Slate’s show about how much language really matters in the hugely popular word game.
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The Story of Ain’t
Listen to Slate’s show about the most controversial dictionary ever published.
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Is Black English a Dialect or a Language?
Listen to Slate’s show about America’s fraught relationship with Ebonics.
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The Other F-Word
Listen to Slate’s show about the history and future of the word faggot.
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Where Did That Sentence-Ending Preposition Rule Come From?
Listen to Slate’s new language show Lexicon Valley, with Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo.
