About
Welcome to the blog of Dr. Goodword, as I call myself on this website. The person behind Dr. Goodword is me, Robert Beard, the guy over there on the left. Yes, I am a real doctor and my specialty is language (PhD Linguistics). For 35 years I taught language and linguistics at Bucknell University, where I conducted research in the behavior of words, developing a theory of their behavior called Lexeme-Morpheme-Base Morphology (LMBM). You can google (a new English verb according to Merriam-Webster) “robert beard language” and find out more about what I’ve spent my life doing.
Now I run a popular website, alphaDictionary.com, writing about a much broader range of linguistic phenomena from my perspective as a morphologist. I started with a website called A Web of Online Dictionaries at Bucknell in 1995 which grew up to become alphaDictionary. Since 1995 I have answered around 25,000 email inquiries and comments about words and language, many of them the same. I am hoping here to expand my forum so that the daily questions I deal with need only be answered once. I will also include unelicited mutterings about language issues that cross my mind from time to time.
Others from the alphaDictionary staff as well as invited guests will also contribute to this blog. Please feel free to comment on anything you read here that tweaks your interest. The focus will vary little, however; our intent is to bring the insights of linguistics (the scientific study of language) to bear on questions of language that arise in our lives every day and do so in such a way that those without linguistic training can understand.
