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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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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
Turns out that some languages are less intelligible through a mask than others, and, believe it or not, it all depends on how often you use certain consonants. It’s called the McGurk effect and it’s t...
· 28 min 33 sec
Dari and Pashto are the two major, official languages of Afghanistan, and are even siblings in the Iranian subfamily of Indo-European languages. One, says John McWhorter, is “disarmingly approachable”...
· 33 min 43 sec
There’s a lot of passionate argument about whether “Critical Race Theory” should be taught in schools. But the meaning of CRT differs greatly depending on who you talk to. What did CRT originally mean...
· 27 min 18 sec
In the 7-part crime drama, Mare of Easttown, Kate Winslet plays a flannel-clad cop with a thirst for Rolling Rock, an appetite for hoagies and a tendency to pronounce water more like wooder. John McWh...
· 31 min 16 sec
Welcome to the new Lexicon Valley from Booksmart Studios! On today’s episode: What is a spelling bee, anyway? Why do spelling bees pair particularly well with the English language? And we’ll explore t...
· 37 min 20 sec
Lexicon Valley offers a close examination of language, exploring its power to inform and misinform, to elucidate and obfuscate. Hosted by renowned Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhor...