Geoffrey Nunberg

Geoffrey Nunberg (June 1, 1945– August 11, 2020) was an American lexical semantician, linguist, and author. In 2001, he received the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistic Society of America for his contributions to National Public Radio's Fresh Air.

Nunberg was the author of a number of popular books, among them Going Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in Controversial Times (2004). He is primarily known for his broadcast work interpreting linguistic science for lay audiences, though his contributions to linguistic theory are also well regarded.

Life Nunberg was born on June 1, 1945, into a Jewish family in New York City. He grew up in the New York suburbs; as a teenager he was attracted to the growing beatnik scene in nearby Greenwich Village.

Nunberg received his doctorate from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1977 for his dissertation, The Pragmatics of Reference. Prior to his PhD, Nunberg received a bachelor's degree from Columbia College and a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania where he studied under William Labov.

Nunberg was a frequent contributor to the collective blog Language Log.

Nunberg commented on language, usage, and society for National Public Radio's Fresh Air program since 1988. His commentaries on language also appeared frequently in The New York Times and other publications. He was the emeritus chair of the American Heritage Dictionary usage panel. His books for general audiences include The Way We Talk Now: Commentaries on Language and Culture from NPR's Fresh Air, Going : Language, Politics, and Culture in Controversial Times, Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show, and The Years of Talking Dangerously (2009).

He was one of the contributors to The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

His last book, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years, was published in August 2012. The critic Malcolm Jones described Nunberg's method in that book as follows: "His means of studying the problem is utterly fresh: take a word, and the attitudes behind it and see where they came from and what they might say about us."