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What's A Thamakau? Spelling Bee Is More About Entertainment Than English

We English-speakers take a perverse pride in the orneriness of our spelling, which is one reason why the spelling bee has been a popular entertainment since the 19th century. It's fun watching...

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Tracing The Origin Of The Campaign Promise To 'Tell It Like It Is'

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So, What's The Big Deal With Starting A Sentence With 'So'?

To listen to the media tell it, "so" is busting out all over — or at least at the beginning of a sentence. New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas calls "so" the new "um" and "like"; others call it...

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Goodbye Jobs, Hello 'Gigs': How One Word Sums Up A New Economic Reality

The obvious candidates for word of the year are the labels of the year's big stories — new words like " microaggression " or resurgent ones like " refugees ." But sometimes a big theme is captured in...

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Everyone Uses Singular 'They,' Whether They Realize It Or Not

Talk about belated recognition. At its meeting in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 7, the American Dialect Society voted to make the 600-year-old pronoun "they" their word of the year for 2015. Or more...

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Changes To French Spelling Make Us Wonder: Why Is English So Weird?

The French have gotten themselves into one of their recurrent linguistic lathers , this one over the changes in their spelling that will be taking effect in the fall. The changes were originally...

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Irked By The Way Millennials Speak? 'I Feel Like' It's Time To Loosen Up

"The way kids speak today, I'm here to tell you." Over the course of history, every aging generation has made that complaint , and it has always turned out to be overblown. That's just as well. If the...

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Is Trump's Call For 'Law And Order' A Coded Racial Message?

"I am the law-and-order candidate." With that proclamation in his acceptance speech, Donald Trump made it official that he'd be recycling the themes and language of Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign. A lot...

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A Resurgence Of 'Redneck' Pride, Marked By Race, Class And Trump

Wherever you look, this is the year of white working-class males — or, as Donald Trump describes them, "the smart, smart, smart people that don't have the big education." Who are they, and why are they...

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Not Fit To Print? When Politicians Talk Dirty, Media Scramble To Sanitize

It has become a familiar story in a world bristling with live mics. A public figure is caught out using a vulgarity, and the media have to decide how to report the remark. Web media tend to be...

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'Normal': The Word Of The Year (In A Year That Was Anything But)

It's been an unusual political year, to put it mildly, and you could write most of its story just by tracking its effects on the lexicon — the new words and new uses of old ones, some useful, some that...

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Lincoln Said What? Bogus Quotations Take On A New Life On Social Media

It wasn't a serious political gaffe, but it was awkward. On Feb. 12, the Republican National Committee tweeted a picture of the Lincoln Memorial along with the quote, "'And in the end, it's not the...

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After Years Of Restraint, A Linguist Says 'Yes!' To The Exclamation Point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unz1CGoFVMU The only literary work about punctuation I'm aware of is an odd early story by Anton Chekhov called "The Exclamation Mark." After getting into an argument...

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The Enduring Legacy Of Jane Austen's 'Truth Universally Acknowledged'

Geoff Nunberg ( @GeoffNunberg ) is a linguist who teaches at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley. Shortly after Amazon introduced the Kindle, they put up a page with a...

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50 Years After The Summer Of Love, Hippie Counterculture Is Relegated To Kitsch

If you're into counterculture kitsch, you might want to check out the nostalgia-themed resort hotel at Walt Disney World in Florida. It features a "Hippy Dippy" swimming pool, surrounded by...

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As Fissures Between Political Camps Grow, 'Tribalism' Emerges As The Word Of...

It's word-of-the-year time again. Collins Dictionary chose " Fake news " and Dictionary.com went with " complicit ." Others have proposed #metoo, "alternative facts," "take a knee," "resistance" and...

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So Longhand: Has Cursive Reached The End Of The Line?

Geoff Nunberg ( @GeoffNunberg ) is a linguist who teaches at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley. Is longhand doomed? People were predicting that as early as 1938,...

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Opinion: U.S. And U.K. Remain United, Not Divided, By Their Common Language

Geoff Nunberg ( @GeoffNunberg ) is a linguist who teaches at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley. "Great Britain and the United States are two nations separated by a...

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Opinion: Why The Term 'Deep State' Speaks To Conspiracy Theorists

The citizens of democracies have always been suspicious about concentrations of unelected power. In the late days of the Roman Republic, Cicero denounced the triumvirate who had usurped the role of the...

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Opinion: A Linguist's Defense Of 'Falsehood'

In his essay " On Liars ," philosopher Michel de Montaigne famously wrote that the truth has a single face, while its opposite has "a hundred thousand faces." That disproportion is reflected in the...

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