Lexicon Valley

Latest Episodes:

The Eloquence of Plain English Jun 04, 2012

Show notes

Was Honest Abe a Poet? How Lincoln’s speaking style evolved from overly ornate to the brilliant simplicity of Gettysburg.

X: @lexiconvalley
Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley
Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Being Done Replaced Doing May 29, 2012

Show notes

As a language evolves, words, phrases and even whole tenses fall in and out of fashion. And then, every once in a while, a whole new way of expressing a particular thought will emerge seemingly out of nowhere and eventually win the day. That’s what happened over the course of the 19th century with the “progressive passive,” which took on a construction known as the “passival” and muscled it completely out of the English language. Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield discuss what’s arguably the biggest change in our language since Shakespeare.

Twitter: @lexiconvalley
Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley
Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One Giant Leap for Humanity May 14, 2012

Show notes

In the third and final installment of the Lexicon Valley series about language and gender, Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield 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 — they. Don’t like that solution? Maybe she’ll convince you.

Twitter: @lexiconvalley
Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley
Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And May He Be a Masculine Bridge May 07, 2012

Show notes

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, Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield discuss the fascinating research by Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky involving grammar and perception. They also wonder 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.

Twitter: @lexiconvalley
Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley
Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Nouns Grew Genitals Apr 30, 2012

Show notes

Languages all across the world have what’s called grammatical gender, which means simply that nouns get divided up into different categories or “classes.” Sometimes those categories are called masculine and feminine, like in Spanish, although for other languages the categories have nothing at all to do with natural gender or biological sex. In the first of a three-part Lexicon Valley series, Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield explore what it means for language to have gender and how it affects the way we think about the world.

Twitter: @lexiconvalley
Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley
Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Needle Pulling Thread Apr 23, 2012

Show notes

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… Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield set out to determine what exactly this sort of “so” might in fact be accomplishing.

Twitter: @lexiconvalley
Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley
Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Meditation on Scrabble Mar 12, 2012

Show notes

Does Scrabble in fact celebrate language? Or does it merely reduce English to a set of mathematical symbols and probability calculations? Mike Vuolo talks 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.

Twitter: @lexiconvalley
Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley
Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Untuning the String Mar 05, 2012

Show notes

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 freakout 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. Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield talk to author David Skinner about his book, The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published.

X: @lexiconvalley
Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley
Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jumpin' Salty in The O Feb 27, 2012

Show notes

Kathryn Stockett’s dialogue-heavy The Help, a novel that was adapted into an Oscar-winning movie, caused a stir over whether a white writer should depict African-American English. But wait, what is African-American English exactly? And isn’t it called Ebonics? Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield sift through the history, misconceptions and reality of a vernacular wrapped in a dialect inside a language.

X: @lexiconvalley
Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley
Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Consider the Lamppost Feb 21, 2012

Show notes

Do you flinch when someone says “between you and I”? Textbook English tells us that it’s categorically 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. Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield discuss the oft-uttered, much-maligned “between you and I.”

X: @lexiconvalley
Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley
Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected