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John McWhorter

New Jersey

Contributor at The New York Times

Columbia linguist, weekly at NYT, biweekly Lexicon Valley podcast and Glenn Show. 9 NASTY WORDS and WOKE RACISM in 2022. PRONOUN TROUBLE in April!

Articles

  • 2 weeks 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.

  • 3 weeks 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.

  • 3 weeks 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.

  • 1 month 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.

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John McWhorter
John McWhorter @JohnHMcWhorter
24 May 25

More from Joseph Horowitz about how classical music actually LIVES in South Africa. (Yes, there!) Cultural Diplomacy in South Africa Continued: the University of Michigan Concert Orchestra Goes to Soweto https://t.co/tCNfmElcW6

John McWhorter
John McWhorter @JohnHMcWhorter
21 May 25

From my friend music critic Joseph Horowitz, who is always right, this must-read: American Cultural Diplomacy in South Africa Right Now, Courtesy of the University of Michigan https://t.co/ZbE9HtnhfY

John McWhorter
John McWhorter @JohnHMcWhorter
15 May 25

Me and the brilliant ⁦@EliLake⁩ - his podcast, on (in our part) Lenny Bruce and the profanity revolution. https://t.co/9dCEhcgH7N