Does texting mean the death of good writing skills? John McWhorter posits that there’s much more to texting -- linguistically, culturally -- than it seems, and it’s all good news. See his TED Talk.
John Hamilton McWhorter V (born 1965) is an American linguist and political commentator. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specialties are how creole languages form and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena.
John McWhorter’s blog on the New Republic.
What is the difference between "a hearty welcome" and "a cordial reception"? In a brief, action-packed history of the English language, Kate Gardoqui explains why these semantically equal phrases evoke such different images. See Kate’s TED-Ed Lesson here.
In an exclusive preview of his book The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds -- and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize.
Murray Gell-Mann gives a quick overview of one of his passionate interests: finding the common ancestry of our modern languages.