Geoff Nunberg
Geoff Nunberg is the linguist contributor on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
He teaches at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of The Way We Talk Now, Going Nucular, Talking Right and The Years of Talking Dangerously. His most recent book is Ascent of the A-Word. His website is www.geoffreynunberg.com.
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Linguist Geoff Nunberg believes there's value in writing by hand — but he doesn't see why the letters have to connect. "You may as well dictate what song we all have to sing in the shower," he says.
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"The meme of the moment is to say that American politics has become 'tribal,'" linguist Geoff Nunberg says. One sign of the division is the fact that no one can agree on how to use the word. -
Looking back on the vanished styles and language of the hippie movement, linguist Geoff Nunberg says, "The most persistent single pejorative term to come out of the era is 'hippie' itself." -
Linguist Geoff Nunberg describes the opening sentence to Pride and Prejudice as a "masterpiece of indirection" that is frequently repurposed, but whose irony is never matched. -
F. Scott Fitzgerald once declared that using an exclamation point was like laughing at your own joke, but linguist Geoff Nunberg begs to differ. He has begun embracing the mark in his own writing. -
Many of those quotes we see on Facebook or Instagram are attributed to authors who never said them. Does it matter when we get a quotation wrong? Linguist Geoff Nunberg says, not always. -
Linguist Geoff Nunberg says that the fact that people are talking a lot about "the new normal" is a sign that we're living in strange and unsettling times. -
Donald Trump isn't the first politician to use coarse language, but linguist Geoff Nunberg says the 2005 Access Hollywood tape of him discussing women's genitalia wasn't like other live-mic incidents. -
The media have used a variety of epithets to describe white working-class Trump supporters. Linguist Geoff Nunberg says these terms embody the class contention that is central to this year's election. -
Donald Trump's promise to be the "law-and-order" candidate revived a slogan often associated with Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. Linguist Geoff Nunberg discusses the term's racial underpinings
