Geoffrey Nunberg Quotes (4 Quotes)

Cell phone makes those boundaries between public and private very porous. In the past, if you're having a spat with a significant other in a public place, one of you will argue and say, 'Not here' because it's intrusive. But now, with cell phones, there's

Only in the plural is a woman likely to be called a guy . You can say, 'Call Mary and Jane and see if those guys want to come to dinner tonight,' ... but you can't say, 'I wanted to invite Alice, but the guy wasn't answering her calls.' This usage may be related to the tendency to use guy as a kind of perky pseudo-pronoun - nowadays you hear people using a phrase like 'those guys ' to refer to everything from ski boots to PowerPoint slides.

Everybody is using the 'V word' now. Basically, it's become a way of saying our values are All-American, and you don't have any ... It will certainly appear at the Republican convention because Bush is not going to let go of the values issue.

The choice of words is important when things like this happen,