Now updated: Geoffrey Nunberg's "shrewd" and "valuable" guide to the way we speak and what this tells us about ourselves and the world we live in (Washington Post Book world)
Going Nucular is Geoff Nunberg's brilliant and witty look at what language reveals about our changing attitudes. Nunberg pronounces blog "a syllable whose time has come," and of Google he says: "You don't get to be a verb unless you're doing something right." Above all, he shows how the important issues of our times can be illuminated by the smallest linguistic cues, if you know how to listen for them. Nunberg explains why conservatives use "and" more than liberals do, and why the way the President says "nuclear" is something more than a simple mispronunciation-"a thinko, not a typo." Listening to the rhetoric of "values" in the 2004 presidential campaign, he traces how "a word that ought to be a bland political bromide has turned into a battle cry for both sides." Nunberg has dazzling receptors, perfect acoustics and a deftly elegant style.
