Lexicon Valley
Lexicon Valley
A podcast about language, with hosts Mike Vuolo, Bob Garfield and John McWhorter.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Apr 24, 2023 • 26min
Picture of Health
Some languages adopt their “health” word from the concept of wholeness — a metaphor that makes perfect sense. Other languages, however, adopt their “health” word from trees.
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Apr 3, 2023 • 31min
The Right Stuff
Like the French word droit, English’s right has taken on a number of useful metaphorical meanings.
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6 snips
Mar 20, 2023 • 28min
Age, Color, Origin, Material
In this favorite from the archives, John discusses some unwritten rules of English that can be remarkably difficult for a learner of English to master.
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Mar 6, 2023 • 28min
One for the Record Books
The word “record” can be broken down into two parts, the re and the cord. But what do those parts even mean?
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Feb 20, 2023 • 34min
Why Do People in Old Movies Talk Like That?
An encore presentation of a much loved episode about the speech patterns of Bette Davis, George Gershwin, Louis Armstrong and countless other Americans of the 1930s. Why do they all sound like that?
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Feb 5, 2023 • 28min
Past Master
So many of our words have ugly associations that are particular to a historical time or event. Should we expunge them entirely from our vocabulary? Can we?
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Jan 22, 2023 • 33min
Are You Tryna Hear This?
Words that come to mean “want” often start out meaning something else. Take “want,” for example.
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Jan 7, 2023 • 33min
The Ambassadors
Henry James wrote his final novels just over a century ago — and yet somehow they are far less accessible than works written much earlier.
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Dec 26, 2022 • 28min
Apostrophe S
Possession is more or less about ownership, and we denote that in English by adding ’s to the end of a word. But of course there’s far more to the story than just that.
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Dec 13, 2022 • 33min
Is "Knocked Up" Racist?
There’s a rumor going around social networks that “knocked up” traces back to American slave trading. Is there any evidence for that etymology?
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