English Language

New Yorker writer John Colapinto says the development of vocal structures may have been the key to humans' becoming the dominant species on the planet. His new book is This is the Voice.

Eley Williams tells the story of two word-mad characters who work for the same dictionary publisher 120 years apart. This novel is perfect for anyone who loves puns, crosswords and witty writing.

Welsh actor Matthew Rhys plays the title role in the new HBO series, Perry Mason. His version of the iconic criminal defense attorney is younger and more hardboiled than the one Raymond Burr played in the popular TV show from the '50s and '60s. The new series focuses on Mason as a divorced private investigator in the early 1930s in Los Angeles — before he became a lawyer.

In the HBO series, which was adapted from Stephen King's novel, the Australian actor plays a detective trying to solve a murder — and resisting the idea that the killer may be a supernatural entity.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg tells us his word of the year, and why he chose it.

With all our texting, tweeting and social media posting, billions of people are using typed words for the kind everyday communication that used to happen more often in conversation. A new book argues that we’ve created a unique new language to reproduce the shades of meaning that we used to convey verbally. Our linguist Geoff Nunberg reflects on the new rules of language that he calls chat-speak.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the use of gender-neutral pronouns.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the word 'algorithm.'

The classically-trained British actor plays a ruthless hedge-fund manager on Billions, which recently ended its fourth season. Lewis describes his character as "the embodiment of the American dream."

HBO's Deadwood: The Movie picks up where the TV series ended in 2006. Olyphant and Milch spoke to Fresh Air about the series in separate interviews, originally broadcast in 2011 and 2005.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the word 'socialism" which has gone from the fringes of American political discourse to the forefront of the national conversation.

Dreyer gets the final say over questions related to grammar, style and clarity at Random House. Now he's sharing his writing advice in the new book Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.

Seven-year-old Jakelin Caal died in U.S. custody in December. Linguist Geoff Nunberg says her death might have been prevented had border agents spoken the Mayan language Q'eqchi'.

Emily Blunt talks about portraying Mary Poppins: getting the accent right, singing, and being suspended from a wire to simulate flying.

President Trump has a penchant for breathing new life into expressions with troubled pasts, like "America first" and "enemy of the people." It's not likely his uses of those phrases will survive his presidency. But he may have altered the political lexicon more enduringly at a Houston rally two weeks before the elections, when he proclaimed himself a "nationalist" and urged his supporters to use the word.

In his essay "On Liars," philosopher Michel de Montaigne famously wrote that the truth has a single face, while its opposite has "a hundred thousand faces."

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the origins of the term "deep state."

"Great Britain and the United States are two nations separated by a common language." That's the stock witticism, but if you ask me, it gets things backwards. Great Britain and the U.S. are more like two nations united by a divided language — or more precisely, by their mutual obsession with their linguistic differences. For 200 years now, writers from each nation have been tirelessly picking over the language of the other, with a mix of amusement, condescension, derision and horror.

It's word-of-the-year time again. Collins Dictionary chose "Fake news" and Dictionary.com went with "complicit." Others have proposed #metoo, "alternative facts," "take a knee," "resistance" and "snowflake."