AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: Martha Brockenbrough, a writer in Seattle and founder of SPOGG, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. Five thousand people get her free e-mails about grammar, usage and w...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: we continue our conversation with James Geary about his new book, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists. An aphorism is a philosophical saying whose author is known. Two ye...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: our guest is James Geary, author of a new book called Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists. RS: It's his second book on aphorisms. He calls these sayings the shortest lite...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti and this week on WORDMASTER: small talk. It's a topic we've discussed before, and some of you would like us to continue the conversation -- like Said, an English teacher in Egypt, and Thynn, a computer programmer from Burma, now h...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: our guest is writer Michael Erard, author of a new book called Um... MICHAEL ERARD: People who have studied speech patterns notice that there are really two groups of people: one...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble. This week on WORDMASTER: we're back with A. C. Kemp from slangcity.com. She calls it the online home of American slang. RS: We're talking about frequently used terms that her international students in her cla...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti and this week on Wordmaster: more about business communication. We talked a couple of weeks ago about the value of a firm handshake and how it's okay to just say your name and nice to meet you when you're introducing yourself. Tod...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: Slang that's not necessarily slang. RS: A. C. Kemp teaches international students as a lecturer in English language studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also...

I'm Adam Phillips for WORDMASTER, sitting in for Roseanne Skirble and Avi Arditti. Today we look at the jargon of international finance. With giant American corporations leading the drive toward the globalization of business, English has become the d...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- getting hyper about correctness. RS: English once had a system where nouns took different forms depending on whether they were the subject or the object of a sentence. We've los...