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What Makes A Word? Making Sense Of The Argle-Bargle
Resume![Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia addresses the ACC America, Association of Corporate Counsel Washington Metropolitan (WMACCA) Chapter, Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012, in McLean, Va. (Luis M. Alvarez/AP)](https://wordpress.wbur.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/0630_scalia-speaks-1000x652.jpg)
Its been a busy week for the Supreme Court. Not surprisingly, that means it has been a busy week for linguists. Consider that in the last few days we've heard Justice Antonin Scalia use both jiggery-pokery and mummeries.
Justice Scalia is known for his eyebrow-raising words. In recent years he's also used the words ukase and argle-bargle.
Are these really words, even if no one knows them? What makes a word a word? And while we're constantly putting words into the dictionary, do we ever take them out? The director of Tufts University's Linguistics Lab, Ariel Goldberg, joins Here & Now's Robin Young with his thoughts.
Guest
- Ariel Goldberg, Director of the Tufts University Psycholinguistics and Linguistics Lab. He tweets @arielmc_g.
This segment aired on June 30, 2015.