Forensic linguistics, the subject of a recent New Yorker piece by Jack Hitt (in full here, is a useful tool in the courtroom. Linguists like Roger Shuy, who’s written a handful of books on the subject, have managed to solve criminal cases by...
Bop-lop-a-boom-bop lop-bam-boom. It's another issue of the A Way with Words newsletter! This past weekend we aired an episode in which a caller told us that she finds the word "moist" repugnant. She's not...
Grant talks about a Jack Hitt article on dying languages in the New York Times, which points out that sometimes “the last living speaker” of a language…isn’t. This is part of a complete episode.