Let’s play a round of linguistic Would You Rather: Would you prefer that everyone talk in language that uses only verbs or only adjectives? Grant and Martha both had the same preference. See if you agree. This is part of a complete episode...
Elisa from Long Island, New York, asks whether frequent (fri-KWENT) the verb can be pronounced with stress on the second syllable, unlike frequent (FREE-kwent) the adjective. Many two-syllable English words shift stress depending on part of speech...
The longer the description of an item on a menu, the more expensive it’ll likely be. In The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, Stanford University linguist Dan Jurafsky shows that with each extra letter in a menu description, the...
Oh, adjectives. Sometimes you are indeed the banana peel of the parts of speech. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Authors Against Adjectives” Grant, how do you feel about adjectives? Love them. Yeah? They’re great...
An Indianapolis caller wonders if there’s any difference in meaning between the words scared and afraid. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Scared vs. Afraid” Hi there, you have A Way with Words. Hello, this is...
What’s the difference between drunk and drunken? If you dig through the linguistic corpora (collections of carefully tagged texts used by linguists and lexicographers), you’ll find that we celebrate with drunken revelry and break into drunken...