AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- slang on campus. RS: Our friend Dianne Gray, an English teacher in Moscow, has a student who would like to know some of the slang used by students at American colleges and unive...

AA: Im Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: Just in time for those unattainable New Years resolutions, the art -- and danger -- of making excuses. SCHLENKER: What excuses do is try to diminish personal responsibility. RS: Ba...

AA: Im Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- the art of rap. This form of music sprang from the hip-hop culture of young, urban African Americans. RS: But, as often happens with black music, it is a white artist who is gett...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble and this week on Wordmaster -- language and the law. RS: That's what our guest today writes about in a column for The Green Bag, which calls itself An Entertaining Journal of Law. David Franklin is a visiting...

AA: Im Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster, English teacher Lida Baker answers some of your questions. RS: Starting with this from Sunny, He Hong Feng, who asks: May I say I am an English teacher or should I say I am a teach...

AA: Im Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER -- slang and idioms in American politics. RS: Tuesday was Election Day, and Slangman David Burke in Los Angeles told us a story about one candidate who had no problem with name reco...

AA: Im Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER, we catch up on some listener mail. RS: The first question is by e-mail from Paul, an English learner in China. He wants to know which is a better name for a hotel: Hotel California...

AA: Im Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- a tribute to Allen Walker Read, who died this month at the age of 96. Mr. Read devoted his life to a kind of linguistic detective work on the origins of American speech. RS: As a...

AA: Im Avi Arditti, Rosanne Skirble is on assignment. This week on Wordmaster -- names in America. And now heres a name that should be familiar by now to our listeners: Lida Baker teaches in the American Language Center at the University of Californi...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- The Wordtree. It's a reverse dictionary that, through a series of branchings, takes you from an idea to a precise verb. An anthropologist named Henry Burger is the publisher. He...