On today’s episode of Spectacular Vernacular, Nicole and Ben pay tribute to the late pioneer in linguistics and cognitive science, Lila Gleitman. They also interview Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster and Fiona McPherson of the Oxford English Dictionary about the keywords of 2021. And finally, we bring on a listener for some wordplay. We hope you’re familiar with the diversity of English dialects. You could win a year’s membership to Slate Plus.
Do you have any language questions or fun facts to share? Email us at spectacular@slate.com.
Produced by Jasmine Ellis and Asha Saluja.
Here are some notes and references from this week’s show:
Lila Gleitman’s obituary in the New York Times
Lila Gleitman’s interview at the 2017 Association for Psychological Science conference
Oxford Languages Word of the Year
Merriam-Webster Word of the Year
American Dialect Society Word of the Year
American Dialect Society’s 2021 Word of the Year livestream — register to join the virtual voting session!
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