John McWhorter
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Isabel Pavia / Getty How I Taught My Kid to Read
Children can learn quickly by sounding out words, letter by letter—but somehow, the method is still controversial.
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Jessica B. Kirk / Shutterstock Don’t Scrap the Test, Help Black Kids Ace It
Commentary on New York’s elite high schools has focused wrongly on access over preparation.
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Tamara Shopsin Why Grown-Ups Keep Talking Like Little Kids
Embracing your inner child is comforting and fun—and just might revitalize the English language.
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Lucas Jackson / Reuters It Wasn’t ‘Verbal Blackface.’ AOC Was Code-Switching.
Her critics are misreading the linguistic reality of America’s big cities.
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AP Freedom Am Won: A Linguistic Mystery
Many of the roots of Black English reach back to the speech of rural white folks in the British Isles.
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Eduardo Munoz / Reuters What the Jussie Smollett Story Reveals
It shows a peculiar aspect of 21st-century America: victimhood chic.
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Aaron Bernstein / Reuters Are All Instances of Blackface Alike?
Perhaps there is a difference between donning it to mock black people and donning it to resemble someone, as Mark Herring did.
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Haraz Ghanbari / AP Could Black English Mean a Prison Sentence?
Court stenographers often misunderstand Black English, and their mistakes could affect people’s lives at crucial junctures.
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AP Why a TV Weatherman Turned MLK’s Name Into a Slur
The incident has been misanalyzed and misjudged—and the Rochester broadcaster should be reinstated.
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Jonathan Ernst / Reuters Trump’s Typos Reveal His Lack of Fitness for the Presidency
They suggest not just inadequate manners or polish, but inadequate thought.
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Scott Olsen / Getty The Virtue Signalers Won’t Change the World
Third-wave antiracism makes sense, and fits into the longer struggle, but it’s a dead end.
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AP Call Them What They Wants
As more English speakers adopt the singular they and reject the gender binary, resisters will have to accept that language changes over time.
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Evan Vucci / AP Trump and the N Word
It’s not the word that matters—it’s the sentiment.
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AP Photo There’s Nothing Wrong With Black English
Accepting it as an alternative form of the language, and not a degraded one, requires being open to artists employing it in their work, even if they didn't grow up speaking it.
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Leah Mills / Reuters The Unmonitored President
Trump is the first president who, rather than striding forward and speaking, just gets up and talks.
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Gerald Penny / AP When People Were Proud to Call Themselves ‘Neoliberal’
Tracking the evolution of one political label to understand why others come and go
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Zak Bickel / The Atlantic The Evolution of 'Like'
How the ubiquitous, often-reviled word associated with young people and slackers represents the ever-changing English language
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Pawel Kopczynski / Reuters The World’s Most Efficient Languages
How much do you really need to say to put a sentence together?
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David Gray / Reuters What’s a Language, Anyway?
The realities of speech are much more complicated than the words used to describe it.
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Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters How Immigration Changes Language
The invention of new ways of speaking is one surprising consequence of migration to Europe.
