'The Elongated Yellow Fruit': On diction

Red Pen: A Grammar Podcast

Do you nictitate, or do you blink? Were the Clampetts new-money, or would you call them parvenus or arrivistes? When it comes to word choice, English draws the battle lines across a few fronts: the plainspoken versus the purple, the Saxonic versus the Latinate, Hemingway versus Nabokov. So let's get into it.

Questions/comments/ideas/snark go in the comments. We love you.

Thing 1: Ryan Davis

Thing 2: Mike Laws

Producer: Amanda Darrach
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Show notes:
Protest Periphrasis: How the words used to describe the actions of police hide their violence, Mike Laws, CJR

Chapters

1. 'The Elongated Yellow Fruit': On diction (00:00:00)

2. Tone, audience, and People magazine (00:07:24)

3. Sesquipedality: Pomposity or dignity? (00:13:44)

4. Pack a punch: Saxonic v Latinate words (00:28:04)

5. Periphrasis and the summer of 2020 (00:35:26)

6. Word repetition and ‘synonym hopping’ (00:47:46)

7. Track changes: Precarity and double spaces (00:55:15)