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Here at KUNC, the news hosts you hear on the radio can sometimes find themselves on the front lines of deciphering grammar questions and intercepting鈥�

A new book looks at words that self-appointed linguistic police have declared contraband, like "lunch," which should be a verb, and "balding," a participle formed from an adjective instead of a verb.

While the media, the public and now the Merriam-Webster Collegiate dictionary all spell it 鈥渇racking,鈥� many in the oil and gas industry don鈥檛.鈥淚 would鈥�

British comedian Eddie Izzard talks with NPR's David Greene about doing stand-up in foreign languages, running far too many marathons, and why he rarely performs in drag these days.

It turns out the first chili peppers were grown by humans in eastern Mexico. And it's not the same region where beans and corn were first grown, according to new ways of evaluating evidence.

Some Ukrainians insist the show is funnier when dubbed in Ukrainian rather than Russian. In the recent crisis in Ukraine, much has been made of the country's language divide.

The dance move that many older folks first heard about this week thanks to Miley Cyrus is now officially defined. Seriously. (Or "srsly," another addition to the online dictionary.)

Pesticides carry warning labels that spell out health risks and how workers should protect themselves 鈥� but those labels are usually in English. More than 80 percent of the workers in the "salad bowls" of Salinas, Calif., or Yuma, Ariz., are Hispanic. Many have difficulty communicating in English.

Stories of dying languages are all too common. A University of Michigan linguistics professor has a completely different tale about the new language she discovered in an aboriginal community of Australia.

The words people use to describe their drinking behavior can say a lot about how they perceive drinking, a perception that may not match reality, researchers say. And the language may also reveal risks that may not be obvious to the drinkers themselves.