Lexicon Valley

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 comple...

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...

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 u...

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...

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: @lexiconvalleyFa...

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/LexiconValleyWebsi...

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...

Kathryn Stockett’s dialogue-heavy The Help, a novel that was adapted into an Oscar-winning movie, caused a stir over whether a white writer should depict African-American English. But wait, what is African-American English exactly? And isn’t it called Ebonics? Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield sift through the history, misconceptions and reality of a vernacular wrapped in a dialect inside a language. X:...

Do you flinch when someone says “between you and I”? Textbook English tells us that it’s categorically ungrammatical, and yet it’s arguably more common than the officially sanctioned “between you and me.” Tennessee Williams, Mark Twain, William Shakespeare — all were guilty of using “I” when the sentence cried out for “me.” Or maybe they weren’t so guilty after all. Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield dis...

On the history and future of the other F-word. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all learned that you’re not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition. But from where did this alleged rule come? And why does it encumber us with such labored sentences as the one preceding this? Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield explore the history of the terminal preposition rule, and whether there are good reasons to follow it. X: @lexiconvalleyFacebook: facebook.com/LexiconValleyWebsite: boo...