From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWhorter and today we're going to talk about...well a whole lot of things actually,

but I'm going to pretend that the podcast is about one thing. And that is R. I wouldn't say the

letter R, but the sound R, whatever that is. And by the way, in the Sleep Plus segment, yes,

we're always going to have that. From now on, you get to learn all sorts of things about the word

can, about knowledge, about spelling, and about how difficult spelling reform would be part two.

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You all ask a lot about R, and there's a lot about R, and I tend to give rather shruggy answers

because this is a very multifarious subject. Well, I'm not going to shrug this time. What is it about R?

And a lot of the curiosity about R that a lot of you have seems to be based on the fact that R is

written, but then so often in so many languages, you pronounce the R as something quite different

from what you would expect. And you know, often not really an R at all. And so you wonder,

well, what is the R doing on the page? What is it with R? Why is it that when you go from language

to language, you often really have to pay attention to your R's and how it's different from RR?

And the first problem in attacking this is that it can be kind of hard from the perspective of

...