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: A listener, Akbar Gandi in Iran, is asking for an explanation of countable and uncountable nouns and the difference between a name and a noun. RS: English teacher Lida Baker has t...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: Our theme is food, or more precisely, slang having to do with food. So we're dusting off a vintage WORDMASTER: a segment we did with our old friend, David Burke, better known as S...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: how the words that couples use when they fight could affect their health. RS: In a new study, forty-two married couples made two overnight visits to a laboratory to discuss their...
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 and this week on WORDMASTER: With the national observance of Thanksgiving Day coming up this Thursday, we turn to a linguistic mystery about the day after, which traditionally opens the Christmas holiday shopping season in America...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: e-mail etiquette. RS: Wendi Eldh [pron. ell'd] conducts business training programs. One of them focuses on helping clients communicate by e-mail, which is harder than you might th...
I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: two-faced words, also known as Janus words after the Roman god with two faces looking in opposite directions or contronyms. RS:We are talking about a word that has developed two oppos...
In 1838, the Cherokee Indians were forced to give up their land in the eastern United States and migrate to what is now Oklahoma. Over 4,000 died on the journey known as the Trail of Tears, but some Cherokee remained behind, hidden in the mountains o...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: We talk about a recent poll taken to find out which words or phrases annoy Americans most in conversation. Here were the five choices. RS: Whatever, anyway, you know, it is what i...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: We're back with Virginia Berninger, an educational psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. RS: A study she and her colleagues did found that children in f...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: we talk with an expert on children and handwriting. RS: Virginia Berninger is an educational psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. She tells us about a...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble and this week on WORDMASTER: We remember William Safire, who died Sunday of pancreatic cancer at the age of 79. RS: Readers of the New York Times knew him not only from his years as a conservative political co...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: we discuss a local dialect spoken in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the host city for this week's Group of 20 economic summit. That's Rosanne's hometown, and she went back in 2000 to t...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti and this week on WORDMASTER: our guest is Emily Kissner, a schoolteacher in Pennsylvania and author of a book called Summarizing, Paraphrasing and Retelling. EMILY KISSNER: When you summarize, you need to first choose what's impor...
