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.
Dr. 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 seven-letter 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, Dr. 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 Dr. Nunberg called a “faux-Bubba” affectation.)
“I don’t think words have any deep interest for their own sake,” Dr. 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 American Indian 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.”
Dr. 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 Indian 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, Dr. 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 called the “auto-correct” function in digital messaging.
At the same time, Dr. 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 Dr. Nunberg’s work. “He just spans the range between them in a remarkable way.”
Dr. 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.”
He also weighed in on the pronunciation of “harass”: “In a recent survey 50 percent of the Usage Panel preferred a pronunciation with stress on the first syllable, while 50 percent preferred stress on the second syllable. Curiously, the Panelists’ comments appear to indicate that each side regards itself as an embattled minority.”
In his scholarly work, Dr. Nunberg published papers on topics including “Indexicality and Deixis” and “Indexical Descriptions and Descriptive Indexicals.” But his primary interest was in how language intersects with social trends and political thought.
In “Going Nucular,” he discussed the use of “was like” by young people as a replacement for “says” or “said” — a modern-day locution that drives grammatical purists mad. Dr. Nunberg found a distinction between the two phrases.
“What follows ‘I said’ is a report of people’s words; what follows ‘I was like’ is a performance of their actions,” he wrote. “Say is for telling, like is for showing . . . there are times when you have to throw yourself back on narrative to make sense of things.”
In his 2006 book, “Talking Right,” Dr. Nunberg described how conservative sloganeers came to dominate the public sphere, best summarized by his long subtitle: “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.”
When Dr. Nunberg published “The Ascent of the A-Word” in 2012, he noted that the word originated during World War II.
“It’s a G.I.’s word most often used for officers,” he said on “Fresh Air,” “and particularly officers who were full of themselves. The first military leader to have been called with the a-word both by his men and by his superiors, by the way, is George Patton.”
The term entered the mainstream around 1970 and has appeared in otherwise tame movies and Broadway plays, as well as in countless office and barroom conversations.
“I don’t have a stance on the word, for or against,” Dr. Nunberg wrote, “though I don’t see how anyone could condemn it out of hand. There’s no end of [a-words] in the world who deserve to be called out as such.”
Geoffrey David Nunberg was born June 1, 1945, in New York City and grew up in the suburbs of Westchester County. His mother was a teacher, and his father was a commercial real estate broker who insisted on proper grammar and usage.
Dr. Nunberg took prelaw courses, studied at Art Students League of New York and wrote scripts for the TV soap opera “Another World” before returning to college at Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1971. He received a master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and a doctorate from the City University of New York in 1978.
Over the years, he taught in Rome and Naples and at the University of California at Los Angeles. After working at the Xerox think tank in Palo Alto, Calif., he was at Stanford University for several years. From the early 2000s until his death, Dr. Nunberg was on the faculty of UC-Berkeley’s School of Information, where he delivered the 2019 commencement address.
His first marriage, to Anne Fougeron, ended in divorce. In addition to his sister of Santa Monica, Calif., Dr. Nunberg’s survivors include his wife of 12 years, Kathleen Miller of San Francisco; and a daughter from his first marriage, Sophie Nunberg of Greensboro, N.C.
Dr. Nunberg had an open ear and mind about language, in all its forms, wherever it was written or spoken, and defended the use of Black vernacular speech as a legitimate, expressive form of communication.
He once faced down a pair of Hells Angels who rose from their bar stools after seeing him take notes about their conversation. Dr. Nunberg explained his profession, the bikers became fascinated and ended up buying him a drink.
“People say the language is falling apart,” Dr. 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.”
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