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Welcome to the Valley!
With esteemed Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter as your host, Lexicon Valley dissects this messy, maddening and thoroughly wonderful thing we call language.
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John is traveling this week and so we’re running a previous episode about the speech patterns of Bette Davis, George Gershwin, Louis Armstrong and countless other Americans of the 1930s. Why do they a...
· 30 min 52 sec
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? John weighs in. This is a public episode. If...
· 24 min 48 sec
Words that come to mean “want” often start out meaning something else. Take “want,” for example. John explains. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or ge...
· 31 min 21 sec
Henry James wrote his final novels just over a century ago — and yet they are far less accessible than works written much earlier. John explains. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss...
· 29 min 48 sec
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. John explains. This is a public...
· 25 min 31 sec
There’s a rumor going around social networks that “knocked up” traces back to American slave trading. Is there any evidence for that etymology? John explains. This is a public episode. If you would li...
· 30 min 54 sec
It’s tempting to imagine that a sentence will translate rather neatly, word by word, from one language to another. It’s also naive. English, after all, is relatively straightforward, while most langua...
· 37 min 10 sec
The book and lyrics of The Music Man are replete with everyday, ordinary dialogue that, nevertheless, demonstrates how English often works. John explains. This is a public episode. If you would like t...
· 28 min 40 sec
English used to have a more or less typical array of second person pronouns, with thou and thee for the singular — subject and object cases, respectively — and ye and you for the plural. So what happe...
· 29 min 13 sec
Comedian Rodney Dangerfield was fond of introducing jokes with a kind of redundancy, for example: “My wife, she told me I was one in a million. I found out she was right.” But those seemingly superflu...
· 33 min 35 sec
The racial reckoning of the past several years has altered the way we think about and use language, often for better but occasionally for worse. And sometimes, as John explains in this episode, what w...
· 34 min 35 sec
Only, lonely, alone and even atone all derive from the number one, which, by the way, wasn’t always pronounced as if it began with the letter w. John explains. This is a public episode. If you would l...
· 30 min 41 sec
Words like chit-chat, pitter-patter and wishy-washy are formed that way for a reason beyond the pleasing way that they sound. The vowel change actually signifies something more meaningful to our human...
· 45 min 36 sec
What does the proliferation of so-called ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos say about the nuanced use of the word satisfying? John explains. This is a public episode. If you would like...
· 38 min 11 sec
As a guest on The Late Show, John told Stephen Colbert that there was nothing especially interesting to say about the word I. Well, he takes that back — there is, it turns out, much to say. Have a lis...
· 32 min 19 sec
Do you remember learning — in grade school most likely — the difference between a count noun and a mass noun? Probably not, and yet chances are that you use them correctly. That’s because you’ve maste...
· 38 min 8 sec
We are frequently asked — often by young listeners who are fascinated by language — how English could possibly accumulate the many thousands of words that make up its vast vocabulary. It’s a topic tha...
· 38 min 11 sec
Hi Valley residents! It's Bob Garfield, former LV host, begging asking you to subscribe to my Bully Pulpit column at bullypulpit.substack.com. It's free, unless you wish to be a paid subscriber, for w...
· 30 min 49 sec
On Jan. 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered — to an audience seated both outside at the U.S. Capitol and at home in front of their televisions — his inaugural address. Millions were stirred...
· 43 min 0 sec
What does it mean to be woke? Has the word problematic become problematic? Today in the Valley, John McWhorter talks with Banished host Amna Khalid about the fraught vocabulary of modern censorship. T...
· 30 min 19 sec