AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: counting words. RS: If you wanted to show people the 88,000 most common words in English, how would you do it? Jonathan Harris thought of a sentence -- or something that looks lik...
DAVE ARLINGTON: Every Thursday we bring you another report in our Wordmaster series, looking at American English. Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble will be back next week. In their place, we meet a man who puts just a few words together in unusual ways...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: the voice of American presidents. RS: Allan Metcalf of the American Dialect Society has just written a timely book. It's called Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Wa...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: with the National Museum of the American Indian opening in Washington, we look at Native American influence on the English language. RS: Linguist Marianne Mithun is author of the...
It's autumn in New York -- time for an all-new razzle-dazzle season on Broadway, the undisputed capital of the American stage. For over one hundred years, audiences have been going to Broadway shows to be moved and entertained blissfully unaware of a...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: a lesson in complaining. RS: English teacher Lida Baker is with us from Los Angeles to discuss a topic suggested by one of our listeners, an English teacher in Iran. His students...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: we have a special guest to discuss creative writing. CHITRA DIVAKARUNI: My name is Chitra Divakaruni, and I am a writer and also a professor of creative writing at the University...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: we continue our conversation about creative writing with a self-described addicted, compulsive reviser.RS: Chitra Divakaruni has written four novels; her newest, Queen of Dreams,...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: proverbs in American English. RS: It's tempting to call Wolfang Mieder the proverbial expert from out-of-town. A professor of German and folklore at the University of Vermont, he...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster we have part two of our look at proverbs in American English. RS: We continue our conversation with Wolfgang Mieder, a professor of German and folklore at the University of Vermont...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: more of our conversation with Jim Tedder, the creator of VOA's online Pronunciation Guide. RS: It used to be that when announcers at VOA needed to know how to say the name of some...
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: the sounds of change. RS: If you want a good example of how language changes, just picture a mouse. Are you thinking of a rodent -- or a device for moving the cursor on a computer...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster we talk about regional changes in American English with University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov [la-BOVE]. Imagine a situation like this: WILLIAM LABOV: Someone says 'gee...
Personal computers and the Internet have become vital tools for everything from communications and research to entertainment and office work. Not surprisingly, new words connected with these technologies are becoming part of common speech. VOA's Adam...
