Speaking of Words

The topic Wednesday was the living English language, as Neal Conan, host of NPR's Talk of the Nation, invited Geoffrey Pullum of Language Log, Grant Barrett of Double-Tongued Word Wrester, and Martha Barnette of NPR's A Way with Words (no relation to this space) to shmooze and spar about the effect of the Internet, instant messaging, and other newish media on the way we communicate. Pullum, who is perhaps best known for refuting the Eskimo vocabulary hoax (no, they don't have hundreds of words for "snow"), mixed it up with a caller named Morgan from San Francisco, who decried the shortening of "until" to "till" and other purported offenses. Nonsense, Pullum retorted: in fact, "till" is a much older word, which became "until" in a 15th-century embellishment. Listen to the whole lively debate.