AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is more than two centuries old. Americans still talk about it a lot, but what exactly is it? RS: We asked American University law prof...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti, with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- the catch of the day, terms from the sea. Lots of nautical expressions have washed ashore into everyday English. Alan Hartley researches them for the Oxford English Dictionary...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: What students coming to study in the U.S. can do to avoid culture shock in the classroom. RS: We asked Susan Iannuzzi. She's an international consultant in English language teachi...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: When two people click, that means they really understand each other. Well, that metaphorical clicking could be the sound of what researchers call speaker-listener neural coupling....
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: Our guest is the author of a book called On Words: Insight Into How Our Words Work -- and Don't. RS: Paula LaRocque has worked for many years as a writing instructor and newspaper...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: Charles Harrington Elster, author of The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly. RS: It's full of examples, such as this common error. CHARLES ELSTER: What you...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: reduced forms in spoken American English. RS: We're talking about forms like whaddaya -- meaning what do you, as in whaddaya say? Whaddaya Say? is also the title of a popular teac...
AA I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: We meet the 24-year-old creator of the website wouldhavesaid.com. RS: The premise is simple. People submit letters saying the things they would have said to a person if they had th...
A: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: If mixing with people at parties leaves you at a loss for words, writer Jeanne Martinet offers some help in an updated edition of her popular book The Art of Mingling. RS: Give us...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: Prepositions for the perplexed. RS: The other day, our colleague Julie Taboh told us about a friend of hers, a non-native English speaker. It seems he once tried to tell someone t...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: More about a legal strategy that critics call by the acronym SLAPP -- a strategic lawsuit against public participation. Let's say some community activists are trying to persuade t...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: What do you call a lawsuit that appears to be intended to suppress public speech? RS: To critics it's a SLAPP -- a strategic lawsuit against public participation. University of De...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: Finding inspiration in the words of those around us. RS: The American poet Emily Dickinson wrote the lines I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you -- Nobody -- too? Then there's a pair o...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: we say hello again to English teacher Lida Baker in Los Angeles to talk about greetings in America. AA: So now typically, if someone says 'how are you doing?' RS: Yeah, typically...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti and this week on WORDMASTER: We follow up on last week's advice to parents about the language benefits of talking to babies. Mariah Evans at the University of Nevada, Reno, led a 20-year study which asked adults in 27 countries to...
