AA: This is Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- did you hear? Were going to talk about gossip! RS: Idle talk, chatty talk, rumors or facts of an intimate nature -- these are some dictionary definitions for what Americans...

AA: This is Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- as delegates in South Africa discuss racism, we discuss the language of race. RS: About thirteen percent of Americans are African American. They are now rivaled in number by...

AA: This is Avi Arditti and this week on Wordmaster -- the language of peace. Robert Johansen is a professor at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He says peace has a guarded place in the American voca...

AA: This is Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble. This week on Wordmaster ... some military terms that have come into civilian slang. RS: Sanya Aina, a listener in Lagos, Nigeria, is writing a book about the plight of peacekeepers in Sierra Leone and is...

AA: This is Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- the language of cliches. RS: These are phrases that lose meaning when we use them all the time. Take the expression: 24-7. Thats another way of saying 24 hours a day, seven...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- English teacher Lida Baker joins us from Los Angeles to talk about phrasal verbs. RS: The first word is a verb. The second word, sometimes even a third, is usually a preposition...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: we talk with an expert on children and handwriting. RS: Virginia Berninger is an educational psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. She tells us about a...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti, and this week on WORDMASTER: choosing the right language for advertising. The December issue of the Journal of Consumer Research contains a paper by Rohini Ahluwalia at the University of Minnesota and Aradhna Krishna at the Unive...

下载音频MP3 AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: with Major League Baseball's championship series delayed by rain -- no World Series game has ever been suspended before -- we thought we'd step up to the plate and...

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: prepositions for the perplexed. RS: The other day, our colleague Julie Taboh told us about a friend of hers, a non-native English speaker. It seems he once tried to tell someone t...