In this week’s episode: Just how far back could you go and still understand the English people were speaking? We crank up our trusty time machine to find out. Hint: You’d probably have a tough time getting around in the eighth century...
If you have a word lover on your gift list, Martha and Grant have book recommendations for you. For adults, Martha recommends linguist Geoffrey Nunberg’s collection of essays, The Years of Talking Dangerously. For kids, Grant’s been...
Text-messaging is destroying our kids’ ability to write, right? Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is part of a complete episode.
If you need proof that language is powerful, here’s some. Researchers at Cornell recently reported that kids are more likely to eat their veggies if they’re told the food has enticing names like “X-ray Vision Carrots” and...
A Pittsburgh woman reports that when she went away to college, she was surprised to find people correcting her grammar when she’d say things like “the car needs washed” or “the kids need picked up.” She wonders if...
third culture kid n.— «Sonia wants to return to Kenya sometime—”I mean, it’s my home”—but doesn’t know when. As a Kenyan-Indian who moved to Singapore when she was six and lived there for 14 years before attending college in...