Explored how language shapes politics, insults
GEOFFREY NUNBERG | June 1, 1945 - Aug. 11, 2020
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist whose early work examined punctuation and computer languages but who was better known for his books and NPR commentaries that explored the political implications of words, as well as the truths, lies and endless mysteries found in how we express ourselves, died Aug. 11 at his home in San Francisco. He was 75.
He had glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer, said his sister, Barbara Nunberg.
Mr. Nunberg’s day jobs were in academia and in a Silicon Valley think tank, but his deepest preoccupation was in understanding how human beings communicate through words, from slang and vulgar slurs to political messaging and professional jargon. (The jargon of linguists, he noted with some embarrassment, refers to words as “lexical items.”)
He published several books, including essay collections and “The Ascent of the A-Word,” about the popularity of a certain sevenletter term applied to annoying bosses or people who used to be called heels and jerks. He was the head of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and, for more than 30 years, provided commentaries on language for the NPR program “Fresh Air.”
In his commentaries, Mr. Nunberg touched on proper grammar and pronunciation, but his approach to language was more observant than doctrinaire.
“Grammar has been taken over by cultists who learned everything they needed to know about grammar in ninth grade, and who have turned the enterprise into an insider’s game of gotcha!” he wrote in his 2004 book “Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times.” (The title referred to President George W. Bush’s persistent mispronunciation of the word “nuclear,” perhaps because of what Mr. Nunberg called a “faux-Bubba” affectation.)
“I don’t think words have any deep interest for their own sake,” Mr. Nunberg told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2001. “It’s what words reveal about things. What do they say about us, about our attitudes?”
In the 1990s, he testified as an expert witness on behalf of an Native American group seeking to revoke the trademark of the Washington Redskins football team, on grounds that federal law prohibited the commercial registration of terms considered “disparaging.”
Mr. Nunberg testified that any use of the word “redskin” beyond a reference to the football team would be considered a racial slur or, as his American Heritage Dictionary called it, “offensive slang.”
“You could put the Redskins’ claim that the success of the team brought honor to Indians,” he wrote on a language blog in 2003, “in the same way, I assume, that the achievements of the New Jersey Devils bring honor to the Prince of Darkness.”
A judge ruled against the Native American groups in 2003, but after further court battles and public protests, the team announced in July that it was permanently dropping the name.
Earlier in his varied career, Mr. Nunberg studied art, wrote for soap operas, lived in Italy and France, and became fluent in several languages. In 1986, he landed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he held the title of principal scientist. He helped develop technologies for digital libraries and language recognition tools that were prototypes for what is now known as autocorrect.
At the same time, Mr. Nunberg was a lexicographer — a writer of dictionaries. Working for the American Heritage Dictionary, he supervised a panel of more than 170 usage specialists, ranging from scholars, novelists and broadcasters to former White House social secretary Letitia Baldrige and actor Tony Randall.
“Few things are more traditional than lexicography; few things are more modern than digital libraries,” linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum told Stanford magazine in 2005, describing Mr. Nunberg’s work. “He just spans the range between them in a remarkable way.”
Mr. Nunberg wrote more than 500 usage notes for the American Heritage Dictionary, including one on the ever-controversial “hopefully.”
“Writers who use hopefully as a sentence adverb, as in Hopefully the measures will be adopted,” he wrote, “should be aware that the usage is unacceptable to many critics, including a large majority of the Usage Panel. But it is not easy to explain why critics dislike this use of hopefully” because “there is no precise substitute.”
“People say the language is falling apart,” Mr. Nunberg told Stanford magazine in 2005. “The language isn’t falling apart. The language never falls apart . ... We don’t know whether we’ll be able to pay for our lunch in 10 years, but we’ll certainly be able to order it.”