Its been a busy week for the Supreme Court. Not surprisingly, that means it has been a busy week for linguists. Consider that in the last few days we’ve heard Justice Antonin Scalia use both jiggery-pokery and mummeries.
Justice Scalia is known for his eyebrow-raising words. In recent years he’s also used the words ukase and argle-bargle.
Are these really words, even if no one knows them? What makes a word a word? And while we’re constantly putting words into the dictionary, do we ever take them out? The director of Tufts University’s Linguistics Lab, Ariel Goldberg, joins Here & Now’s Robin Young with his thoughts.
Guest
- Ariel Goldberg, Director of the Tufts University Psycholinguistics and Linguistics Lab. He tweets @arielmc_g.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. 9(MDAxNzg0MDExMDEyMTYyMjc1MDE3NGVmMw004))
/
/