英语单词大师：Epigram Writer

DAVE ARLINGTON: Every Thursday we bring you another report in our Wordmaster series, looking at American English. Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble will be back next week. In their place, we meet a man who puts just a few words together in unusual ways

英语单词大师：Wordcount.org

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: counting words. RS: If you wanted to show people the 88,000 most common words in English, how would you do it? Jonathan Harris thought of a sentence -- or something that looks lik

英语单词大师：Recession Spawns an

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: terms from the recession. Dictionary editor Ben Zimmer is back with us. And it sounds like he's going to start with a popular term these days, shovel-ready. (Sound of shoveling)BE

英语单词大师：Talk to the Hand

I'm Nancy Beardsley, filling in for Avi Arditti and Rosanne Skirble. This week on Wordmaster we'll talk about bad manners-and how they're reflected in what people are saying and not saying to one another these days. Our guest is British writer Lynne

英语单词大师：No Gunplay

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: palindromes aplenty! RS: A palindrome is something that reads the same backwards or forwards. Palindromes make us think of Janus, the Roman god with one face looking forward, anot

英语单词大师：Happy Holidays

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: the paradox of a social greeting designed not to offend anyone that, by its very design, offends some people. RS: Next Sunday, most Americans will celebrate Christmas. This year,

英语单词大师：Small Talk

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: a conversation about small talk. RS: Our guest is Debra Fine, author of a new book called The Fine Art of Small Talk.DEBRA FINE: It is not the business conversation, not the busin

英语单词大师：Alabama, Part 1

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: a lesson in regional English in the American South. RS: And to give you that lesson is a woman who wrote to us from Alabama named Donna Akins. Donna Akins is not an English teache

英语单词大师：Language

The show business trade paper Variety turns 100 this year, and it continues to vex and amuse its readers with a language all its own. In this slanguage, as Variety staffers have dubbed it, media giant Disney is known as the Mouse, a reference to its

英语单词大师：New TOEFL

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble. This week on Wordmaster: more about the redesigned Test of English as a Foreign Language from the Educational Testing Service. Over the coming year, the new TOEFL iBT -- or Internet-based test -- will replace

英语单词大师：Literary Voice

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: the new TOEFL. RS: TOEFL is the Test of English as a Foreign Language. It's required by many colleges and universities in the United States and elsewhere as a measure of a student

英语单词大师：We're Americans

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: What to call the homeless of Hurricane Katrina? RS: Some have called them refugees. We asked Oxford English Dictionary consultant Ben Zimmer for a history of this word. BEN ZIMMER

英语单词大师：U.S. Writing Style2

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: more of our discussion with Jane Dunphy, director of the English Language Studies Program at M.I.T., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. RS: Our subject is the American sty

英语单词大师：Speak American

I'm Avi Arditti. Rosanne Skirble is away. This week on Wordmaster: Do You Speak American? That's the name of a new book by journalist Robert MacNeil. Mr. MacNeil -- who was born and raised in Canada -- explores how immigration, technology and other f

英语单词大师：English Teachers

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: meet two more English teachers. RS: Qu Gang teaches in the world's biggest country, China. He is a member of the National Foreign Language Teaching and Research Association. Doug

英语单词大师：Pronunciation

AA: I'm Avi Arditti; Rosanne Skirble is away. This week on Wordmaster: pronunciation the North American way. Our guest is Colleen Meyers. She teaches English to international teaching assistants at the University of Minnesota. She's also a co-author

英语单词大师：Styles and Sports

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: the sport of conversation. FIRST ANNOUNCER: Not going to stop him!SECOND ANNOUNCER: I tell you, you get him out on the run, Felton's quick, but he's not faster than Brown. Felton

英语单词大师：Emotion Words

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: words that express emotion. RS: Suppose someone gave you two minutes to write down as many different emotions as you could think of -- for example: happy, sad, angry. You're also

英语单词大师：To Be a Good Teacher

AA: I'm Avi Arditti, and this week on WORDMASTER: an update on an Iranian listener. Rosanne Skirble and I spoke to her by phone early in 2005. RS: Well, what do you like about studying English? What is it, is it a ... ATEFEH: Oh, no, actually I love

英语单词大师：What Difference Does a

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: prepositions for the perplexed. RS: The other day, our colleague Julie Taboh told us about a friend of hers, a non-native English speaker. It seems he once tried to tell someone t