Geoff Nunberg

'Horrific' And 'Surreal': The Words We Use To Bear Witness

Geoff Nunberg — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 19:33:00 +0000

Mass shootings, bus crashes, tornadoes, terrorist attacks — we've gotten adept at talking about these things. Act of God or act of man, they're all horrific. At least that was the word you kept hearing from politicians and newscasters describing the Boston bombings and the explosion at the fertilizer plant in Texas.

That may not strike you as surprising — the events were horrific, weren't they? But it's actually a new way of describing things. "Horrific" is an old word; it turns up in Thackeray and Melville. But until recent times it was rare and literary.

Historical Vocab: When We Get It Wrong, Does It Matter?

Geoff Nunberg — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 20:05:00 +0000

Has there ever been an age that was so grudging about suspending its disbelief? The groundlings at the Globe Theatre didn't giggle when Shakespeare had a clock chime in Julius Caesar. The Victorians didn't take Dickens to task for having the characters in A Tale of Two Cities ride the Dover mail coach 10 years before it was established. But Shakespeare and Dickens weren't writing in the age of the Internet, when every historical detail is scrutinized for chronological correctness, and when no "Gotcha!" remains unposted for long.

'The Whole Nine Yards' Of What?

Geoff Nunberg — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 19:25:00 +0000

Where does the phrase "the whole nine yards" come from? In 1982, William Safire called that "one of the great etymological mysteries of our time."

He thought the phrase originally referred to the capacity of a cement truck in cubic yards.

Slut: The Other Four Letter S-Word

Geoff Nunberg — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:36:00 +0000

Geoff Nunberg, the linguist contributor on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, is the author of the book The Years of Talking Dangerously.

"My choice of words was not the best," Rush Limbaugh said in his apology. That's the standard formula for these things — you apologize not for what you said but for the way you said it.

Though in this case, there didn't seem to be a lot of distance between thought and word.