May 2020: retronyms, schwa, Language Files videos, and my 8th blogiversary

I did an interview for the New York Times about the vocabulary of covid times. Here’s a portion of it:

Looking ahead, linguistic changes are yet to come, Ms. McCulloch said. She explained the concept of a retronym — assigning a new name for a default now dated by technology or social change; for example, with the rise of cellphones, non-mobile phones became “landlines.”

“We are still in the phase of naming the new things we’re encountering, but eventually we’ll get to the stage where we need nam...