On today’s episode of Spectacular Vernacular, Nicole and Ben pay tribute to the late pioneer in linguistics and cognitive science, Lila Gleitman. They also interview Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster and Fiona McPherson of the Oxford English Dictionary about the keywords of 2021. And finally, we bring on a listener for some wordplay. We hope you’re familiar with the diversity of English dialects. You could win a year’s membership to Slate Plus.

Do you have any language questions or fun facts to share? Email us at [email protected].  

Produced by Jasmine Ellis and Asha Saluja. 

Here are some notes and references from this week’s show:

Lila Gleitman’s obituary in the New York Times 

Lila Gleitman’s interview at the 2017 Association for Psychological Science conference 

Oxford Languages Word of the Year 

Merriam-Webster Word of the Year 

American Dialect Society Word of the Year 

American Dialect Society’s 2021 Word of the Year livestream — register to join the virtual voting session!

Subscribe to Slate Plus. It’s only $1 for the first month. To learn more, go to slate.com/spectacularplus.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices