Time Goes Bye

Melissa gave me a heads-up about a recent Fresh Air episode in which linguist Geoffrey Nunberg described Time's effect on language. I hadn't realized how pervasive Time's influence has been in journalism. The sentences that start with long participle phrases that back in to the subject. A host of coined words. The absence of the first-person singular pronoun, itself a corollary of the notion of a reporter who's anonymous and not in the piece. Many of the bad habits of modern journalists come from the magazine's early days, though the magazine itself has not maintained them.

Here's the iTunes store link. The piece starts at 37:35, after a somewhat interesting interview with Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and an Evangelical Christian.