AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: We check in with the American Dialect Society for some notable words from the past year, including the one that the group considers least likely to succeed.

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: There's a new book called "Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms."

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: Our guest is David Marcello, executive director of the Public Law Center, a joint program of the Tulane and Loyola law schools in New Orleans.

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: We're back with the author of the new book "OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word."

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: We talk with Allan Metcalf, author of the new book "OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word."

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: Our theme is food, or more precisely, slang having to do with food. After all, Thanksgiving is just a day away, and the traditional way to celebrate the holiday is with a big, festive

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. The first word is a verb. The second word, sometimes even a third, is usually a preposition. Phrasa

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: If you're looking for a break from all the U.S. election news, we've got the answer. We're back with "Slangman" David Burke to finish reading through a letter filled to the break

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: We're back with management expert Kathleen Kelley Reardon, talking about her new book, "Comebacks at Work: Using Conversation to Master Confrontation."

RS: She says dealing

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: A conversation with Kathleen Kelley Reardon, a management professor whose newest book is called "Comebacks at Work: Using Conversation to Master Confrontation."

KATHLEEN REAR

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: We're back with linguist and author Deborah Tannen, discussing communication between sisters, the topic of her most recent book "You Were Always Mom's Favorite!"

RS: "Did

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: We're joined by Deborah Tannen, the Georgetown University linguist and author of best-selling books on how we communicate. Her early work focused on the different conversation styles

A: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: our guest is linguist Geoff Nunberg. He's been listening to how Americans debate issues, and there's a particular word he often finds they invoke: "sensitivities."

GEOFF NU

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: a lesson in complaining. RS: English teacher Lida Baker is with us from Los Angeles to discuss a topic suggested by one of our listeners, an English teacher in Iran. His students woul

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is more than two centuries old. Americans still talk about it a lot, but what exactly is it?

RS: We asked American University law p

AA: I'm Avi Arditti, with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- the catch of the day, terms from the sea.

Lots of nautical expressions have washed ashore into everyday English. Alan Hartley researches them for the Oxford English Dictiona

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: What students coming to study in the U.S. can do to avoid culture shock in the classroom.

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: When two people "click," that means they really understand each other. Well, that metaphorical clicking could be the sound of what researchers call "speaker-listener neural couplin

PAULA LaROCQUE: "If they're thinking about beauty and clarity, they won't be seduced by the things that cheapen the language. And, to my mind, that's the proliferation of unnecessary euphemisms or fad and cliché, the things that are embedded in the la

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: Charles Harrington Elster, author of "The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly."

RS: It's full of examples, such as this common error.

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: reduced forms in spoken American English.

AA I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: We meet the 24-year-old creator of the website wouldhavesaid.com.

A

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 someo