AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: a fresh look at a topic we did with Slangman David Burke in Los Angeles five years ago this month: food-related slang. This time, he's whipped up one of his exclusive stories base...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- the language of non-verbal communication. Two writers, Melissa Wagner and Nancy Armstrong, have put together a book of one-hundred-eight gestures and their various, and sometime...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- English teacher Lida Baker in Los Angeles talks about improving English pronunciation by understanding the idea of thought groups. RS: Thought groups are something we don't even...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- we talk with the author of a book called Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. RS: Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst Colleg...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- we invest some time with the author of a book about financial terms. SCOTT: Stock markets around the world have done fairly well, but in the U.S. money has come back into stocks...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- it's time for our monthly chat with Slangman David Burke in Los Angeles. RS: We were sad to hear that even Slangman, who's always so happy, occasionally has a really bad day. SL...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- the story of one of life's little truths. RS: It's a law we all live under, and it goes this way: If anything can go wrong, it will. It's known as Murphy's Law. AA: Murphy was E...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- the American National Corpus! RS: In linguistics, a corpus is a body of words. It's language collected in context, from books, poems, recorded conversations, newspapers, broadca...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- evasive maneuvers in American English. RS: Listening to a conversation on a train one day got Maggie Balistreri thinking. She became interested in the ways that Americans can sa...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- we look into spider holes and some other terms that have come out of the war in Iraq. RS: Sunday's news of the arrest of Saddam Hussein included some military lingo that has cap...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- winning words for 2003 as voted by a small group of linguists and other scholarly observers of the language. RS: More than seventy members of the American Dialect Society voted...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- English teacher Lida Baker joins us from Los Angeles to talk about phrasal verbs. RS: They're all around us, especially in spoken English. The first word is a verb. The second w...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- political rhetoric in America. RS: This time, Howard Dean didn't scream. He finished what he called a solid second behind John Kerry in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday. AA:...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- a new way to learn slang. RS: It's a pack of sixty cards with slang terms on one side. Definitions and synonyms are on the back, plus a humorous illustration. AA: Jen Bilik says...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- telling less, and showing more. RS: Adjectives are words that modify or describe nouns. But here's how a lot of writers and writing teachers describe adjectives: in a word, over...