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.
-
A lively new book by Gretchen McCulloch dissects the common vernacular that forms the cornerstone of online communication. Because Internet parses emojis, lols and punctuation — or lack thereof. -
For anyone struggling to use "they" as a singular pronoun, linguist Geoff Nunberg says: Just practice. He believes human language processing capacity is far more adaptable than people realize. -
Artificial intelligence becomes hard to ignore when it starts taking over tasks that used to require human judgment — such as winnowing job applications or prioritizing stories in a news feed. -
President Trump created a firestorm when he described himself as a "proud" nationalist at a recent rally. Linguist Geoff Nunberg says the word carries a specter of racism and belligerence. -
Linguist Geoff Nunberg says none of the differences between American and British English would be interesting if the nations didn't share a core vocabulary grown from a common literary tradition.
-
The media have used a variety of epithets to describe white working-class Trump supporters. Linguist Geoff Nunberg says these terms embody the class contention that is central to this year's election. -
Donald Trump's promise to be the "law-and-order" candidate revived a slogan often associated with Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. Linguist Geoff Nunberg discusses the term's racial underpinings -
While some of his colleagues have criticized the current trend of starting sentences with the phrase, "I feel like," linguist Geoff Nunberg says it's just a case of generational misunderstanding. -
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century evokes another famous tome with "capital" in its title, and makes comparisons inevitable.
-
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.
