Lexicon Valley

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg on his book Ascent of the A-Word: A**holism, the First Sixty Years. Twitter: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Should we care when a language dies? Twitter: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

The Narrative Mastery of Seinfeld's Kramer: Talking About the Past in the Present Tense. Twitter: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

How we know L. Frank Baum didn't write the 15th Oz book — the surprising way mathematicians can determine authorship. Twitter: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

“Lord Grantham, Don Draper’s on Hold”: The algorithm that finds anachronisms in Downton Abbey, Mad Men and Edith Wharton. Twitter: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Was Honest Abe a Poet? How Lincoln’s speaking style evolved from overly ornate to the brilliant simplicity of Gettysburg. Twitter: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

As a language evolves, words, phrases and even whole tenses fall in and out of fashion. And then, every once in a while, a whole new way of expressing a particular thought will emerge seemingly out of nowhere and eventually win the day. That’s what happened over the course of the 19th century with the “progressive passive,” which took on a construction known as the “passival” and muscled it completely out of the English language. Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield discuss what’s arguably the biggest change in our language since Shakespeare. Twitter: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

In the third and final installment of the Lexicon Valley series about language and gender, Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield discuss the ongoing quest for a single, more equitable alternative to “he” and “she.” Since at least the 1850s, English speakers have made many unsuccessful attempts to introduce an epicene pronoun into the language. But University of Michigan professor Anne Curzan argues that we don’t need such a word, since we already have a perfectly acceptable, if controversial, alternative — they. Don’t like that solution? Maybe she’ll convince you. Twitter: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Does talking about an object as masculine or feminine somehow cause us to think of it that way? In the second part of a Lexicon Valley series about language and gender, Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield discuss the fascinating research by Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky involving grammar and perception. They also wonder what may have happened to grammatical gender in English — that’s right, once upon a time we had grammatical gender, too. But then we lost it. Twitter: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley

Languages all across the world have what’s called grammatical gender, which means simply that nouns get divided up into different categories or “classes.” Sometimes those categories are called masculine and feminine, like in Spanish, although for other languages the categories have nothing at all to do with natural gender or biological sex. In the first of a three-part Lexicon Valley series, Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield explore what it means for language to have gender and how it affects the way we think about the world. Twitter: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley