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Our New Year's tradition: the music group Riders in the Sky, joined by Johnny Western, tell the story of a fellow with a strange habit of speaking only in palindromes |
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''My first resolution that I would recommend people make is to spend a certain amount of time listening to English ... whatever suits a person's work schedule'' |
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''E-mail bankruptcy is when you have so much e-mail ... you say to yourself 'I'm not even going to bother with these,''' says lexicographer Grant Barrett |
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''Whenever you're speaking to a group you have to slow down anyway, even if you're a native speaker,'' says English teacher Nina Weinstein |
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''A lot of times people are nervous because they're focused on themselves. And I tell them that's not the focus,'' says English teacher Nina Weinstein |
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We answer some listener questions -- for instance, what do you call people who talk in their sleep? |
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A conversation with Tom Dalzell, the senior editor of the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English |
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''Compounding is when we take two words in English and we put them together to make a brand-new word,'' says teacher and author Lida Baker |
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''I'm pretty regularly told 'You're stupid,' and I would take it a lot more seriously if they used the apostrophe instead of just Y-O-U-R,'' says Martha Brockenbrough |
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More with James Geary, author of ''Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists,'' who says Ben Franklin was America's first great spinner of philosophical sayings |
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James Geary, author of the newly published ''Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists,'' discusses this literary art form. First of two parts. |
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''I tell my students this is like playing tennis. When someone says 'Beautiful day today, isn't it?' they've hit the ball to you,'' says English teacher Nina Weinstein |
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"People who say 'uh' or 'um' are not necessarily uneducated or unprepared or unintelligent," says Michael Erard, author of a new book called "Um..." |
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A. C. Kemp, who teaches English at M.I.T. and runs slangcity.com, discusses frequently used terms from TV shows and movies. Second of two parts |
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A. C. Kemp, an English teacher at M.I.T. and keeper of slangcity.com, did a computer analysis of TV and movie scripts for us and discusses her findings |
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From a C-SPAN television interview, political adviser Frank Luntz discusses his book "Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear" |
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Advice from longtime writing coach Paula LaRocque, author of the new book "On Words: Insight Into How Our Words Work -- and Don't" |
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Our friend David Burke, known as Slangman, talks about his latest instructional materials, which are aimed at American children |
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''It's unique because in addition to teaching the skills of teaching English, it engages in the political, economic and cultural theory of what it means to learn English'' |
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''What's happened is that words that fifty years ago were perfectly acceptable words have become unacceptable words,'' says linguist Mark Aronoff |
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Nancy Tuten of Columbia College in South Carolina talks about the value of working with professors in different disciplines to promote writing across the curriculum |
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"It means working so hard to avoid one potential problem that you end up falling into another one," says Jack Lynch, an English professor at Rutgers University |
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English teacher Nina Weinstein follows up on her advice about handshakes to discuss other areas of business communication, including the importance of eye contact |
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''Even if you speak French, Spanish, German or Mandarin ... finance is only English. It’s actually very mundane English,'' says professor Salih Neftci |
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''Also, people hug here a lot more than they may in other cultures. My students can be very uncomfortable with that,'' says English teacher Nina Weinstein |
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''One of my main goals is I try to make sure everything I say takes about a second to get,'' says Shahryar Rizvi, a computer specialist at the US Census Bureau |
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"If we learn certain Latin and Greek root words, we have kind of a window into the English language," says teacher and author Nina Weinstein |
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More of our interview with Rob Jackson, director of Duke University's Global Change Center, about some terms you're likely to hear in the climate change debate |
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Professor Rob Jackson, director of the Global Change Center at Duke University, explains terms like carbon footprint and cap-and-trade, in the first of two parts |
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Jodi Schenck, an English teacher in Israel, gives her high schoolers a list of phrases from the Internet and says: "All of these things? No, you can't use them." |
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Viktoriya Galiy, director of a language school in Chisinau, says native speaking teachers and teacher training programs are both in short supply |
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English teacher Nina Weinstein takes the confusion out of some common conversational strategies in American English that can help speakers buy time |
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Shukry Marash-Ogly is a linguistics professor in Kyrgyzstan. We also hear from Ibrahim Rustamov, a secondary school teacher in Tajikistan. |
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Yvette Drew, who teaches English as a second language to newcomers in the Atlanta area, discusses why her students are so interested in politics |
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Interviews from the TESOL 2007 Convention in Seattle: An Iraqi professor who teaches English teachers, and a Libyan teacher (pictured) in the US to teach Arabic |
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Want to be a fashionista, or at least sound like one? Take to the catwalk and learn some of the terms used in the fashion industry |
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For the start of March Madness, the flurry of college basketball games for the national championship, a look at some of the lingo that has bounced off the court |
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"I think the quotations of a country express the preoccupations of that country," says Fred Shapiro, editor of the new Yale Book of Quotations |
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"One of the easiest ways to learn about thought groups is to listen to popular music," says English teacher Lida Baker, who gives advice on improving pronunciation |
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"German has a choppy rhythm, Vietnamese has a choppy rhythm. But English doesn't; English wants to be a smooth language,'' says teacher Nina Weinstein |
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"Make sure you're matching your personality with the way that you act when you're online," says Kristina Grish, author of the new book "The Joy of Text" |
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Yet Shakespeare's language "was pretty much commonplace English" in his time, says Georgianna Ziegler of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington |
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English professor Wayne Glowka discusses the American Dialect Society's 2006 Word of the Year, and the dispute over what to call the plan for more troops in Iraq |
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Losing your native language by acquiring a new one? "I would argue that this is actually an adaptive good thing," says Ben Levy at the University of Oregon |
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"What students need to look for when they're using online dictionaries, or any dictionaries, is the usage notes," says English teacher Lida Baker |
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"I don't advise students unnaturally adapting these forms," says Nina Weinstein, author of the book "Whaddaya Say?" -- find out what she does advise |
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