AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: some advice about writing. RS: For the past 18 years, Jim Allan has run a secretarial center in Los Angeles. He offers typing -- and a lot more. He draws on his background as a co...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble and this week on Wordmaster: a report from NBC News that caught our attention. RS: It's about a word that is spreading like no other. (MUSIC) FEMALE: Like, I saw these guys who, like, were really cute. MALE: A...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: English teacher Lida Baker explains the use of the words after and before. LIDA BAKER: I'm going to say a few sentences and I just want you to tell me two things: Is the sentence...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER some ways to help you improve your memory. ELDH: We don't forget, we just haven't learned it in the first place. RS: That's Wendi Eldh. She's a communications trainer who teaches m...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: the language of Hurricane Katrina. RS: Debra Howell is an artist who has lived in New Orleans on and off since the late 1960s. She says she never evacuated for a hurricane before...

More than half of the over one hundred native California tongues have disappeared. Many others have only a few, aging speakers. When this last fluent generation dies, languages spoken by Californians over centuries, will also die. At a recent gatheri...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: we answer some listener questions. RS: Starting with this one from Rajpal Rawal in India, who sends us two sentences with questions about pronunciation -- more specifically, about...

I'm Nancy Beardsley, filling in for Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble. This week on Wordmaster we'll talk about bad manners-and how they're reflected in what people are saying and not saying to one another these days. Our guest is British writer Lynne...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: our guest is Tom Dalzell, senior editor of the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English -- and, now, the Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconven...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti. Rosanne Skirble is away, but joining me from Los Angeles is English teacher Lida Baker to explain our topic on Wordmaster this week. It's a feature of the language called compounding. LIDA BAKER: Compounding is when we take two w...