Moderator

Mark Abley is a poet, nonfiction writer, editor, and journalist living in Montreal, where he writes the Watchwords column on language for the Montreal Gazette. He is both a Rhodes Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow. His books include Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages (2003) and The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English (2008).

Panelist

Robert Jones is a strategist at London-based brand consultants Wolff Olins and a visiting professor at the University of East Anglia. He is author of The Big Idea (2008). Jones’s clients range from corporations including Aviva, Barclays, and PwC to not-for-profits such as Oxfam and Tate.

Panelist

Frank Nuessel is Professor of Languages and Linguistics and University Scholar at the University of Louisville. He served as president of the Semiotic Society of America in 2011 and is currently president of the American Association of Teachers of Italian. He is Chief Reader of AP Italian Language and Culture Exam (2006–09, 2011– ).

Panelist

Ben Zimmer is executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com and writes a language column for The Boston Globe. He was formerly the "On Language" columnist for The New York Times Magazine and editor of American dictionaries at Oxford University Press. He serves as chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society.