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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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More than half the world’s approximately 7,000 languages will have no speakers left in the coming decades. Some are working feverishly to preserve or maintain them. Others are asking: Why bother? John...
· 44 min 13 sec
Do you know that the past participle of the intransitive verb lie is lain and that its past tense is lay, not to be confused with the present tense of the transitive verb lay? Oh, and do you know that...
· 26 min 49 sec
You might guess that Nigeria and Niger derive their names from the Latin word for “black,” especially since both countries were formerly colonized by Europeans. Guess again. John explains.Bonus segmen...
· 8 min 38 sec
President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee has said that her parents picked “Ketanji” from a list of West African names supplied by a relative. But West Africans speak hundreds of languages spread out ac...
· 38 min 12 sec
As John likes to say, Proto-Indo-European — the original ancestor of many European and Asian languages — began on the steppes of Ukraine. This is his linguistic love letter to a region and a people un...
· 28 min 26 sec
To describe inclement weather in English, we might say that “it” is raining, which seems natural to a native speaker. But does “it” refer to the sky, the outdoors, the god of precipitation? Maybe it’s...
· 31 min 16 sec
You may have noticed, among widespread coverage of looming Russian aggression, an unfamiliar pronunciation of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. What’s with the name change? And what does it have to do with...
· 41 min 4 sec
A hot mic caught President Biden using the epithet to describe a Fox News reporter. Where did “son of a b***h” come from, and why are modern speakers increasingly choosing other insults? This is a pub...
· 25 min 35 sec
Actors Sidney Poitier and Max Julien and law professor Lani Guinier — all of whom died this month — have last names that reveal fascinating stories about pronunciation, etymology and language change....
· 43 min 43 sec
Self-styled language experts — and let’s face it, that includes all of us — have lamented the decline of English for centuries. From shifting pronunciations to newfangled words to evolving grammar, ev...
· 33 min 9 sec
Happy New Year! In the warm and generous spirit of the holidays, we’re making this week’s bonus segment free to all. But there’s more: Until the end of the year, you can get 30% off a subscription to...
· 3 min 0 sec
An alphabet, one of humanity’s greatest innovations, is far from intuitive. Our own English lettering was borrowed from the Romans, of course, but where did they get it from? And where did the concept...
· 38 min 9 sec
To continue our celebration of the re-release of 10 original Lexicon Valley episodes with Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield, we’re making today’s bonus content free for everyone. Presenting the fan-favorite...
· 5 min 25 sec
To celebrate the re-release of ten original Lexicon Valley episodes — remastered, ad-free and for paying subscribers only — Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield return as hosts for this special show about the...
· 39 min 57 sec
We’re giving John McWhorter a well-deserved day off. But the show must go on, so we’re bringing back a couple of Lexicon Valley legends for a special reunion episode. This is a public episode. If you...
· 1 min 24 sec
The late philosopher Paul Grice formulated four brief maxims by which conversations are generally governed. Most humans find it relatively easy to observe them. Machines, on the other hand, not as muc...
· 6 min 14 sec
Language is tricky. It doesn’t do what you think it should. It’s as messy as almost anything that’s created by natural selection. And that’s what makes it so fun. This is a public episode. If you woul...
· 31 min 20 sec
Scrabble and other similar games have been the subject of an ongoing lexicographic debate in recent years, with some arguing that ethnic slurs have no place in the official dictionary or on the board....
· 31 min 16 sec
Dividing up nouns as “masculine” and “feminine” — like, for example, in Spanish — has not been a part of English for many centuries. And yet our language remains peppered throughout with gender, often...
· 33 min 53 sec
English has been calling out for a gender-neutral pronoun for more than a century, with many failed attempts at invented words and portmanteaus. Singular "they" — once the scourge of schoolhouse gramm...
· 33 min 49 sec