Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist whose elegant essays and books explained to a general audience how English has adapted to changes in politics, popular culture and technology, died on Aug. 11 at his home in San Francisco. Kathleen Miller, his wife, said the cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. He was one of a small group of linguists, among them Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, renowned beyond their academic universes. “I always saw him as the paragon of public intellectualism,” the linguist Ben Zimmer, who writes a column on language for The Wall Street Journal, wrote in an email. “He was a lucid, effective communicator about thorny linguistic issues for many decades.”

Source: New York Times August 22, 2020 21:11 UTC