Perhaps this has happened to you before. You’ve said something that someone misunderstood — with or without a translator. Due to culture, language, or even gender, a statement like "I appreciate your frankness" comes across as "I enjoy your rudeness." The new play, "Chinglish" pays tribute to, and pokes fun at, these moments when something gets lost in translation. The play is in both Mandarin and English. And because the show has subtitles similar to those at the opera, the audience is fully in on all the jokes, even when the mono-lingual characters are not. 

Scientists have found that babies can become fluent in foreign languages at an extremely fast rate; one that begins to slow down by their first birthday. What is it about the make-up of their brains as newborns that gives them this ability? Could adults train their brains to be more like the brains of babies?

People in 2011 have more ways to communicate now than ever before, and how we communicate says a lot about who we are. We tweet, we text, we chat online. And every word has a particular significance — maybe even more than we often realize.

English is English, right? Not so, according to Matthew Engel of The Guardian. Last week, he wrote an article for the BBC about the most offensive “Americanisms” — words or phrases that Americans have distorted over time. The list includes "faze," "elevator," and "rookies." The Guardian then invited readers to send in their own most-hated Americanisms. 

Ben Zimmer, Executive Producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com is putting John and Celeste to the test by asking them to identify the real definition of words with truly American origins. Could you identify absquatulate, callithump and copacetic? If so, you might do well on producer Kristen Meinzer's quiz.

Here are the words with which Ben Zimmer tried to stump the hosts: absquatulate, callithump, copacetic, hornswoggle, lagniappe, rumbustious. Do you know what they mean?

205 years ago, a lawyer-turned-textbook writer-turned-newspaper-editor published the first American English dictionary. It was 1806, and the title was “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language.” That man’s name was Noah Webster. And today, his name is synonymous with the word “dictionary” in the U.S. Joshua Kendall is the author of a new biography on Webster called: “The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture.” Joshua joins us from our partner, the WGBH, in Boston.

Was Noah Webster an unheralded founding father? That's what the author of a new book about the man who gave his name to the first ever American dictionary. In fact, Webster added words that had not been in any British dictionary that came before his. We're testing your knowledge of these Webster words (the old ones and the new ones) with a quiz. See how well you do.

From English teachers to grammar grouches, people have been complaining for generations that the English language is going down the drain. As they see it, our vocabularies are shrinking, our grammar is abysmal, and we’ve all but forgotten about how to punctuate (?!). Carol Shaffer is one of those grammar grouches. A former teacher, she’s also the founder of the website Grammarpolice.com, which has been pointing out language usage errors for fifteen years. Robert Lane Greene has a different perspective. The author of the new book, “You Are What You Speak,” he thinks what some people see as errors are in fact evolution.

Tomorrow, we'll talk to Robert Lane Greene, who wrote a book about the way we speak and what that says about our identities. We want to hear about your experiences. Tell us about a time when the way you speak has gotten in the way for you? You can use our iPhone app to record your answer or you can just respond here.

We’ll play a selection on the air and post them online. If you can snap a photo as well, all the better.

Thanks!

Last Friday, while Japan was being shattered by the largest earthquake in its history, I was asleep in my Brooklyn bed, oblivious to the tragedy occurring on the opposite side of the globe.

When I woke up the next morning and turned the spigots on my many digital pipelines — email, Facebook, Twitter — the first thing I saw, even before I read the news itself, was a flood of reassuring messages from friends and family in Japan: "shaken, but safe"; "terrified, but all present and accounted for."

I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon and start reviling Glenn Beck or Gilbert Gottfried or the shallow UCLA girl on YouTube. Better minds than mine have already articulated why it's wrong to pile insult on top of deep, tragic injury.

Instead, I want to appeal to my countrymen to rise above these nasty comments. Let me begin with Alec Sulkin, a scriptwriter for "Family Guy" who tweeted the following: “If you wanna feel better about this earthquake in Japan, google “Pearl Harbor death toll.” Let's turn that around and imagine someone had written this ten years ago, "If you want to feel better about 9/11, google "My Lai Massacre." Sure, the first amendment protects that kind of speech, but doesn't your conscience prevent you from saying it?

Today the granddaddy of all dog shows — the Westminster Dog Show — kicks off. As you may know, it’s something of a beauty contest for dogs. And last year, we commemorated the event by asking listeners to submit pictures of their dogs for our cutest dog contest. But this year, we’re more interested in brains than looks. We’re asking you to send in pictures and videos of your dogs being brilliant. As she did last year, WNYC's Sarah Montague will judge your entries this week. And today we’re talking with two scientists who know a thing or two about canine intelligence.

After President Obama’s 2009 State of the Union address author Stanley Fish responded this way to Barack Obama’s performance:

“It’s as if the speech, rather than being a sustained performance with a cumulative power, was a framework on which a succession of verbal ornaments was hung, and we were invited not to move forward but to stop and ponder the significances only hinted at.”

Why do we say we’re "flying by the seat of our pants?" Or that someone’s "got our goat?" Harry Oliver has researched hundreds of the quirky phrases we use in everyday life, and found out the history and stories behind each one. His new book is called “Flying by the Seat of Your Pants: Surprising Origins of Everyday Expressions.”

Ben Yagoda, a professor of English and Journalism at the University of Delaware wrote an article in this week's Chronicle of Education called “The Elements of Clunk” in which he laments some currently popular usages that tend to make the language clumsy and awkward. Yesterday, we asked you to find the problems in a sentence provided by Professor Yagoda. He joins us to discuss the results and the clunky trends he has observed plaguing written English today.

How many times a day to do you say OK? Ten, twenty, fifty? Chances are, you say it a lot — whether you're acknowledging and agreeing to a request, or telling somebody how you're feeling. But who invented it? And what does the use of "OK" indicate about us culturally? OK if we talk about it? 

The "World Wide Web" has become the central way most people interact with (and describe) the network of text and media on the internet. Twenty years ago today it was a temporary name given by British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee to an information management project he was working on. Ben Zimmer, linguist, lexicographer and “On Language” columnist for our partner, The New York Times Magazine, joins us to discuss how language describing the Web has evolved over the last two decades.

The blues are blue and when you get the blues you feel blue but listening to Blind Lemon

Jefferson does not immediately inspire a trip to the Cote ‘d’Azur. The ideas of blue for English speakers, for American English speakers, for French and Spanish speakers are certainly all different.

But what about the color blue? Is the blue sky over Nice and Barcelona the same color as the smoky azure in some Southside Chicago blues bar?

It’s impossible to know what happens inside the brain in this way but thinking about how brains are changed by the languages their owners speak. Got me thinking about how isolated I’ve always felt as a mono-lingual English speaking American who has a smattering of Latin, German and Spanish lying dormant inside his skull.

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet," according to Shakespeare's Juliet. But would it look the same, too? Does language shape the way we see the world? And how do culture and language influence one another?

All week long, in partnership with our friends at Scientific American, we’re talking about "the end" on The Takeaway. Whether it’s melting glaciers, the falling water table, or even how the world itself will end, we’re exploring our fascination with endings.

Today, we examine the stunning evidence of how Western civilization is changing and, in some cases, eliminating indigenous cultures. Half of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered, and when language dies, whole cultures can disappear. Vital, ancient wisdom can be lost.

So we ask you: What traditions or wisdom do you think is worth saving? And what do you do to preserve them?