Lexicon Valley

How we know L. Frank Baum didn't write the 15th Oz book — the surprising way mathematicians can determine authorship. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Lord Grantham, Don Draper’s on Hold”: The algorithm that finds anachronisms in Downton Abbey, Mad Men and Edith Wharton. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Was Honest Abe a Poet? How Lincoln’s speaking style evolved from overly ornate to the brilliant simplicity of Gettysburg. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you noticed the seemingly stratospheric rise of the word “so” in recent years? People use it not only as a conjunction or an intensifying adverb — as in “That’s so awesome!” — but also to begin or end sentences in a manner pregnant with implied meaning. So… Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield set out to determine what exactly this sort of “so” might in fact be accomplishing. Twitter: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Does Scrabble in fact celebrate language? Or does it merely reduce English to a set of mathematical symbols and probability calculations? Mike Vuolo talks to Word Freak author and competitive Scrabble player Stefan Fatsis about how a math game disguised as a word game nevertheless unlocks the essential beauty of the English language. Twitter: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the early 1960s, amid a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, a burgeoning civil rights movement here at home, and a dawning countercultural revolution, America’s intellectual class was in an utter freakout over a dictionary. That’s right, the 1961 publication of Webster’s Third Edition incited otherwise sober-minded newspaper and magazine writers to declare nothing less than the end of the world. Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield talk to author David Skinner about his book, The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices