Ben Yagoda’s books include ‘Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English’ and the novel ‘Alias O. Henry.’ His podcast is The Lives They’re Living.
Ben Yagoda
By Ben Yagoda
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Culture Hey, Irving — why are there so many Jews named Irving?
A mystery of Jewish nomenclature finally solved — in honor of all the Miltons, Seymours, Sidneys and Irvings out there
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Culture What Bob Dylan Owes to Frank Sinatra — and Vice-Versa
In the summer of 1966, Frank Sinatra passed a baton to Bob Dylan. Not literally, of course: it’s hard to imagine, at that point in their lives, the two men being in the same physical space. Sinatra had been the most important figure in American popular music for twenty-five years: from his bobbysoxer days with…
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Culture How Steven Pinker Became the Anti-Maven of Language
Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard, didn’t coin “language maven” (William Safire did, back in the ’70s, to describe himself), but he did more than anyone else to popularize the term. In a 1994 article in The New Republic called “Grammar Puss,” included in his subsequent book “The Language Instinct,” Pinker…
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