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Welcome to the Valley!
Lexicon Valley is an audio show dissecting this messy, maddening and thoroughly wonderful thing we call language.
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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. Twitter: @lexiconvalley Facebook: fa...
· 31 min 23 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
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 42 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 17 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 15 sec
What is a spelling bee, anyway? Why do spelling bees pair particularly well with the English language? And we’ll explore the tempting but complex prospect of spelling reform. Plus: A special subscribe...
· 37 min 19 sec
A grueling, painful, lifelong joy of studying Russian was sparked by Anna Karenina. Twitter: @lexiconvalley Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley
· 35 min 24 sec
From vowelless words to complex poetry, Berber to Somali. Twitter: @lexiconvalley Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley
· 41 min 34 sec
Deconstructing a single line of dialogue from Netflix's "The Crown." Twitter: @lexiconvalley Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley
· 42 min 57 sec
Why are so many of the languages of Southeast Asia "like Chinese"? Twitter: @lexiconvalley Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley
· 36 min 7 sec
English is full of redundancies—so why are we bothered by only a select few? Twitter: @lexiconvalley Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley
· 37 min 34 sec
John McWhorter teases his new book about off-color English expressions, starting with c!#k. Twitter: @lexiconvalley Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley
· 36 min 41 sec
A single word—take "self," for example—reveals the thorny nature of literary translation. Twitter: @lexiconvalley Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley
· 42 min 59 sec
Don't be fooled into thinking that English is a typical language. It's not. Twitter: @lexiconvalley Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley
· 40 min 4 sec
For many languages, the idea that the subject belongs up front is plain backwards. Twitter: @lexiconvalley Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley
· 39 min 29 sec
How did a word meaning "with bread" come to sprout its corporate connotation? Twitter: @lexiconvalley Facebook: facebook.com/LexiconValley Website: booksmartstudios.com/LexiconValley
· 40 min 12 sec