Geoff Nunberg
Geoff Nunberg is the linguist contributor on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
He teaches at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of The Way We Talk Now, Going Nucular, Talking Right and The Years of Talking Dangerously. His most recent book is Ascent of the A-Word. His website is www.geoffreynunberg.com.
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Linguist Geoff Nunberg believes there's value in writing by hand — but he doesn't see why the letters have to connect. "You may as well dictate what song we all have to sing in the shower," he says.
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"The meme of the moment is to say that American politics has become 'tribal,'" linguist Geoff Nunberg says. One sign of the division is the fact that no one can agree on how to use the word.
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Looking back on the vanished styles and language of the hippie movement, linguist Geoff Nunberg says, "The most persistent single pejorative term to come out of the era is 'hippie' itself."
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Linguist Geoff Nunberg describes the opening sentence to Pride and Prejudice as a "masterpiece of indirection" that is frequently repurposed, but whose irony is never matched.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald once declared that using an exclamation point was like laughing at your own joke, but linguist Geoff Nunberg begs to differ. He has begun embracing the mark in his own writing.
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Many of those quotes we see on Facebook or Instagram are attributed to authors who never said them. Does it matter when we get a quotation wrong? Linguist Geoff Nunberg says, not always.
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Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century evokes another famous tome with "capital" in its title, and makes comparisons inevitable.
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When dictionaries add trendy words like "twerk," they're prioritizing the fleeting language habits of the young, says Geoff Nunberg. And our fascination with novel words tends to eclipse subtle changes in the meanings of old ones — "which are often more consequential," he says.
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The Republican vice presidential pick wants to take another look at programs like Medicare and Social Security. Fresh Air's resident linguist parses the word "entitlement" in its political and nonpolitical contexts.
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Linguist Geoff Nunberg doesn't enjoy everything about the English language. There are phrases that get on his nerves and words that he prefers not to use. And Nunberg says he's not the first person to have linguistic pet peeves — nor will he be the last.