Journalist Bianca Bosker infiltrated the world of contemporary art and wrote about it in her book Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See (Bookshop|Amazon), often with hilarious results. She describes the lexicon of art curators, whose language is peppered with such words as indexicality, iconicity, and durational, and observes,”Art devotees spoke like they were trapped in dictionaries and being forced to chew their way out.” This is part of a complete episode.
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...
Meg in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, gets why the state highway department encourages drivers to use their blinkers when changing lanes, but placing a digital sign at the Sagamore Bridge that reads Use Ya Blinkah is, well, a lexical bridge too far. Meg’s...
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