AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: English teacher Lida Baker explains the use of the words after and before. LIDA BAKER: I'm going to say a few sentences and I just want you to tell me two things: Is the sentence...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER some ways to help you improve your memory. ELDH: We don't forget, we just haven't learned it in the first place. RS: That's Wendi Eldh. She's a communications trainer who teaches m...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: the language of Hurricane Katrina. RS: Debra Howell is an artist who has lived in New Orleans on and off since the late 1960s. She says she never evacuated for a hurricane before...
More than half of the over one hundred native California tongues have disappeared. Many others have only a few, aging speakers. When this last fluent generation dies, languages spoken by Californians over centuries, will also die. At a recent gatheri...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: some advice about writing. RS: For the past 18 years, Jim Allan has run a secretarial center in Los Angeles. He offers typing -- and a lot more. He draws on his background as a co...
I'm Nancy Beardsley, filling in for Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble. This week on Wordmaster we'll talk about bad manners-and how they're reflected in what people are saying and not saying to one another these days. Our guest is British writer Lynne...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: a track from the original Broadway cast recording of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. RS: The show is a musical satire of spelling competitions and the pressure to go t...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: acting like an actor to improve your memory. RS: Our guest is Tony Noice, an actor, director, teacher and cognitive researcher - someone who studies how we think. He and his psych...
I'm Nancy Beardsley, filling in for Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble. This week on Wordmaster we'll talk about communication -- and miscommunication -- between mothers and daughters. Our guest is Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown University linguistics pro...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: we answer some listener mail. RS: Faisal in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is stuck in traffic -- traffic terminology, that is. Faisal is taking an English course. It seems that one day, many...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: giving doctors better skills to communicate bad news. RS: Anthony Back [pronounced like Bach] is a medical oncologist at the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cance...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: English teacher Lida Baker suggests five resolutions for people who want to improve their English in the New Year. LIDA BAKER: My first resolution that I would recommend people ma...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: closing the dictionary on some words of 2005. RS: Grant Barrett is project editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang at Oxford University Press. We talked to him last...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: palindromes aplenty! RS: A palindrome is something that reads the same backwards or forwards. Palindromes make us think of Janus, the Roman god with one face looking forward, anot...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: the paradox of a social greeting designed not to offend anyone that, by its very design, offends some people. RS: Next Sunday, most Americans will celebrate Christmas. This year,...