Linguist Geoff Nunberg, Who Explored Our Ever-Changing Language, Dies At 75

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Fresh Air language commentator Geoff Nunberg became a regular contributor to Fresh Air in 1987.

The Nunberg family

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The Nunberg family

Opinion
Opinion: ‘Nationalist’ Arises, With Myriad Connotations, As The Word Of 2018

In the years that followed, we always looked forward to finding out what Geoff would choose as his word of the year. In 2018, the word was «nationalist. Here’s how Geoff started the piece:

President Trump has a penchant for breathing new life into expressions with troubled pasts, like «America first and «enemy of the people. It’s not likely his uses of those phrases will survive his presidency. But he may have altered the political lexicon more enduringly at a Houston rally two weeks before the elections, when he proclaimed himself a «nationalist and urged his supporters to use the word.

Opinion
Opinion: Even A Grammar Geezer Like Me Can Get Used To Gender Neutral Pronouns

One of the last pieces Geoff did for us was about the use of gender-neutral pronouns. He focused on people who identify as nonbinary, who use the gender-neutral pronoun «they, rather than «he or «she. Geoff was confident we could all learn to adjust, writing:

It’s not a lot to ask — just a small courtesy and sign of respect. In fact, the accommodations we’re being asked to make to nonbinary individuals are much less far-reaching than the linguistic changes that feminists called for 50 years ago. Yet the reactions this time have been even more vehement than they were back then.

A fifth-grade teacher in Florida whose preferred pronouns are «they, «them and «their was removed from the classroom when some parents complained about exposing their children to the transgender lifestyle. When the diversity and inclusion office at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville published a guide to alternative pronouns in 2015, the state legislature promptly defunded the center and barred the university from promoting the use of gender-neutral pronouns in the future. Like the classic episodes of pronoun rage in earlier eras, these aren’t about pronouns at all.

Opinion
After Years Of Restraint, A Linguist Says ‘Yes!’ To The Exclamation Point

That’s just a small sample of Geoff’s hundreds of Fresh Air pieces. But of course, he was known for many things beyond our show. He was a linguist who’d taught at Stanford and worked on linguistic technologies at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. In the last years of his life, he was an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. He wrote scholarly articles and books for general readers. He wrote pieces for magazines and newspapers.

Opinion
So Longhand: Has Cursive Reached The End Of The Line?

I know I’m leaving out plenty of other accomplishments. But we will always think of Geoff as a member of the Fresh Air family. Always. We will miss him enormously. We send our deepest sympathies to his wife Kathleen and his daughter Sophie.

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