John McWhorter

1 month ago | nytimes.com | John McWhorter

About 20 minutes into the fifth episode of the second season of "The White Lotus" - when Alex describes his old friend Cameron's tendency to seduce women Alex was interested in - Cameron's wife, Daphne, responds in playful indignation with a single word: "Rude!" Except she stretches it out into two syllables: "Rude-uh!" or perhaps "Ru-duh!" That extra syllable goes by quickly, but it does a lot of work.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | John McWhorter

Credit... Jared Soares for The New York Times I don't know why I was surprised when President Trump went after the Smithsonian Institution, in particular the National Museum of African American History and Culture - or as it's more informally known, the Black Smithsonian. If anything, I should have been surprised he held off for two months.

1 month ago | claremontreviewofbooks.com | John McWhorter |Jeffrey Anderson |Christopher Caldwell |Andrew E. Busch

Download There is a rhyme in Ira Gershwin’s lyric for “Someone to Watch Over Me” that is easily missed when the song is sung in a rhythmically flexible ballad style, as it usually is today:Although he may not be the man someGirls think of as handsomeTo my heart he’ll carry the key. That level of quiet yet fierce craft is classic Ira Gershwin, and yet it is no surprise that Michael Owen’s Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words is the first full-length biography of him.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | John McWhorter

Hearing people play their cellphones without headphones or earbuds is now a common fact of life. So is hearing people complain about it. Some regard it as a direct threat: The person playing his iPhone like a radio, the argument goes, is essentially angling for a fight, daring you to say something so he can lash out in response. Some of the folks I see acting like this do indeed seem glowering and unfriendly.

2 months ago | persuasion.community | John McWhorter

A graduate school colleague told me that her subfield of linguistics was more valid as science than the subfield some other students were working in. Her metric was that the findings in her subfield were more counterintuitive, as opposed to applying terminology to things we basically know are true already. I didn’t like it. My work was commonly (mis-)associated with the kind she was dissing. I sensed that she thought me more well-spoken than exactly brilliant. Diplomatic she was not.