Episode 122: Says Who, with Anne Curzan
Note: this is mostly an automatic transcription, lightly edited and corrected. Punctuation and formatting are not perfect.
Mark: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Endless Knot Podcast,
Aven: where the more we know,
Mark: the more we want to find out.
Aven: Tracing serendipitous connections through our lives
Mark: and across disciplines.
Aven: Hi, I'm Aven.
Mark: And I'm Mark.
Aven: And today we're talking about language for a change. Or how language changes. We're going to be speaking with Dr. Anne Curzan. Dr. Anne Curzan is Geneva Smitherman Collegiate Professor of English Linguistics and Education and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan.
She is an expert on the history of the English language, and in addition to studying how the language itself has changed over the past 1500 years, she explores how attitudes about words and grammar have shifted as well.
Mark: Professor Curzan can be found talking about language on the weekly show That's What They Say on local NPR station Michigan Radio.
She also wrote bi [00:01:00] weekly for six years for the blog Lingua Franca on the Chronicle of Higher Education's website. Her TED Talk, What Makes a Word Real, has more than 2. 1 million views on the national TED Talk site.
Aven: Her newest book, "Says Who?, a kinder, funner usage guide for everyone who cares about words", was released on March 26, 2024.
And here is our interview talking all about that book.
So hi, Anne. Thanks so much for being here.
Anne: I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Mark: Welcome.
Aven: So we will start off with our traditional first question that we always ask our guests, which is about connections, since that's the theme of our in so much as our show has a theme, that's the theme of our show.
So can you tell us about. a moment in your life or a connection in your life that has been unexpected or has borne unexpected fruit. [00:02:00] In particular, it could be between work and life or any two elements of your work. Anything that you've just was a moment of unexpected connection.
Anne: I love this question and it lets me tell a wonderful story about an unexpected connection, which is that.
My work in linguistics is how my partner and I met and he is a surgeon So the story is that I Have recorded a couple of courses for the Great Courses, which is now called Wondrium and their audio video courses. One of them is called The Secret Life of Words. And my partner trained as a surgeon is one of the most intellectually curious people I have ever met.
And he took my course on the history of words. And after a few episodes, he emailed me a really lovely email thanking me for the course, letting me know that he [00:03:00] was enjoying it, sent me an article. And there was something about his email that was intriguing enough. I get a certain number of emails per week from people who've watched or listened to the course, but there was something about his email that... he had included his information in his signature.
And I looked him up and let's just say that I liked what I . could learn about him online and he got a much friendlier email from me that I might otherwise have sent. And we very quickly started a robust email correspondence and a month later he flew to Detroit, he lives in San Francisco, flew to Detroit to meet me and we have been together ever since.
Aven: Oh, okay, that has got to be one of my favorite answers to this question that I have heard.
That is so nice.
Anne: So people sometimes say to me, wait, he was your student? Actually, kind of.
Aven: It's all right, if you're not grading them, it's [00:04:00] allowed.
Oh, that's amazing. That is, that is really, yeah. Well, you know that it's based on a solid foundation of intellectual compatibility then, don't you?
Anne: Absolutely. And we get to have entertaining conversations about language all the time. So, so thank you for the question, because your question set me up to tell one of the really wonderful stories of my life.
Aven: Awww, well, I totally understand that because not that that's not that we met through anything like that, but Mark and I being in very similar fields as it turned out, because I'm a classicist and he's a medievalist and we both work on language and literature. I know that feeling of being able to have the conversations about the thing that you're passionate about with the person you're passionate about.
It's pretty special. It is. All right. Well, everything else is going to be a slight letdown from that story because that was so good. But we can move maybe on to talking about, you've talked about [00:05:00] this being your work in linguistics. Maybe we can start with that. And before we turn to your book and ask you, you know, how did you yourself get into linguistics and language?
Anne: This is another story that I like to tell, particularly to students here at the University of Michigan, because I went to college as a math major. I really like math. I had always been good at math. I had also always been interested in languages, had learned a couple languages in junior high school and high school.
Honestly, when I went to college, and this was before the internet, I didn't really know what linguistics involved in any specific way. So I went to college as a math major. I took an introductory linguistics course my first year, which I enjoyed enough to take another linguistics course my second year.
And it was that course in my sophomore year of college, which was a course on the history of the English language with Marie Boroff, [00:06:00] who is an outstanding medievalist.
Aven: Mm hmm.
Anne: And I suddenly realized I wanted to know all the answers to the questions that she was asking. I pretty much wanted to be her.
And what's interesting is I look at my college career after that, I switched from math to linguistics and no matter what the course was about after that, I wrote about the history of English in my final paper.
Aven: So
Anne: I took a couple of years after college and I went and taught in central China. At that point, I realized I really wanted to go back to graduate school and study the history of English specifically, and was lucky enough to come to the University of Michigan for my graduate work where I had remarkable mentors.
And got to dive into the history of English, and that's what I've been doing ever since.
Mark: Excellent. I can, I can very much relate to that kind of origin story. [00:07:00] Did you
Anne: change majors?
Mark: Yes. I started off as a, as a music major. And then I, started doing some English classes and decided to take that up as a minor.
And then as soon as I, was exposed to Old English, I immediately fell in love with it and changed to specialize in that and wanted to do specifically, medieval language as well as the literature. But I really wanted to focus on linguistic issues just because I fell in love with the sound of Old English.
Anne: I loved studying Old English in graduate school.
Mark: Yeah, I did my graduate work in In a medieval studies program, in fact at the University of Toronto, University of Toronto.
Anne: uh,
I think it's really important for students to hear these kinds of stories because there can be a lot of pressure on students as they head to college to be able to say from the moment you land on campus, or even before this is what I'm majoring in and this is what I know I'm going to do with that.
And if that turns out to [00:08:00] be true, that's great. But I also think it's really important for students to know that college can be about exploration and finding something you're passionate about that you didn't even know that you could study.
Aven: Yeah, we know such a small number of things before we go to university in terms of what's even available, what's out there.
Most people, and you teach linguistics, you know this, I taught classics, I know this, most people step onto campus not knowing that these fields exist. And why should they? That's not a failing in their schooling. It's just that's what's going glorious about a university campus, especially one with a good broad, liberal arts and sciences, that does the full sort of undergraduate spectrum gives you, that exposure.
Anne: Right. And then I feel incredibly lucky to be on a university campus and to be hanging out with so many thousands of people who are between 18 and 23 years old, because as a historian of the English language, I am of course also studying how the language is changing. all around us. [00:09:00] And as we all know, young people are the movers and shakers of language change.
I learn a lot from them about what is happening in the language. One of my favorite things to do is start class every day by having them teach me one or two new slang words. and then you start class. And I learn all kinds of great things. And I have had students sometimes say, I always make sure to get to your class on time because I don't want to miss the slang words.
Aven: Has any class ever started a secret campaign of trying to "make fetch happen" with you, of teaching you slang words that don't exist? Because that is immediately where my mind went, which probably said something about me.
Anne: Well, or me. I don't. I don't know. You wouldn't know. How would you know?
Aven: It's so true.
Yeah. I know that is one of the wonderful things is being open to, and when we turn to talking about your book, being open to the [00:10:00] excitement of seeing what the heck people are coming up with in language. Yeah. As opposed to angry about it. But
Mark: it is really fun, just to listen to your students and, notice things.
I still remember with great joy the time I heard one student use singular they to refer to a known person, another student who was not non binary. But it was just because, her gender wasn't relevant to what we were saying. And he just defaulted today. And, it made me think, yeah, this is, totally going to take over.
It's, so natural for them. They don't even think about it.
Anne: And I have learned a lot about texting from students. I am not a particularly adept texter as they point out to me once they hear my questions. And I've done this now for many years, which is compiling a texting etiquette guide that where they together come up with the rules.
There's often a lot of consensus. And it has allowed me to [00:11:00] help older people see that, for example, young people have repurposed punctuation to do the work of facial expression and tone. So I know that the period at the end of a text is serious and perhaps angry,
Aven: depending on your audience. Yes, exactly.
Anne: And that, one exclamation mark is just pretty much friendly. If you really want to show excitement, you got to have at least two. And it's such an important message for some of the older folks, and I consider myself in that category, when I'm giving talks to say, it's not that young people don't care about language or that texting is chaos.
There is a different system at play and punctuation is used differently. but there is a system and young people are actually very attuned to the details of language. And they will tell me about, one of them will get a text, for example, from someone that they're potentially interested in. [00:12:00] And in that apartment or dorm room, they will be doing some serious close reading of that text in terms of the particular emoticon or emoji that was used, two exclamation marks versus three, whether this was capitalized or not.
So it is, this is not chaos.
Mark: No. Yeah. And I mean, it's important for, professors to keep in mind that, when we teach them how to write formal essays or whatever, we're expecting them to become bi- dialectal and in many cases, I imagine the student probably knows more about our dialect as an academic than we know about their dialect.
And I, feel that same sort of humility when I have, a bilingual student who speaks some other first language. And I think, well, yeah, obviously English isn't their first language, but they know way more about English than I do about their first language almost certainly.
Anne: Right. And Mark, I think you're making a really important point there [00:13:00] about students having the power and authority and being given the opportunity to teach us. And so when I'm doing something like the texting etiquette guide, we can then have conversations about, okay, this is how their punctuation, and other things work in this genre or register of writing.
And you're teaching me about that. I happen to know quite a lot about how punctuation works in academic formal writing.
Aven: Right.
Anne: And I'm happy to share that knowledge with you so that you can navigate those spaces. And that immediately moves us away from language about the correct use of punctuation.
Because what we know is it's the most appropriate use in those registers to use punctuation that way. But to use academic punctuation in texting is not going to get you very far. And so I love that it immediately leads us into a much more nuanced conversation about audience and purpose and genre and different conventions and choices.
Aven: And showing them [00:14:00] that they are very like, even for them to realize that they have rules because you know, just like any native speaker of a language doesn't know how much grammar they know until you give them the labels for it. You know, somebody who understands texting etiquette really well on their generational level hasn't formulated or thought about the fact that they have really specific rules.
And so you're helping them realize that they do. and that makes it easier for them to understand, Oh, I care about these rules a lot. So it's not crazy that somebody else cares about other rules a lot. I know that my exact choices make a huge difference to how I'm interpreted in this context.
Oh, okay. I'll apply that same thinking to this other context.
Anne: I think that's beautifully put. And then it becomes a little bit more of a game where you're learning different rules for different outcomes. I worry that the way we teach grammar and punctuation and the like in K 12 and even in college can feel really loaded for students that [00:15:00] they're supposed to know this, that if they were smart, they would know this and that we can take some of that pressure off and say, these are rules to different games, different rules to different games.
And we're here to help you have access to all the things you want to have access to.
Aven: yeah, to make it functional and pragmatic.
Anne: Right. And dare we say, perhaps even fun.
Aven: Very fun or funner, maybe.
Yeah, I spend a lot of time trying to convince people in my life that grammar isn't moral. And I think that's like where we've, been too long that it's not just that it is about how smart you are, which is bad enough, but it's actually about how good a person you are.
And that is a, a difficult place to be as a culture, I think.
Anne: That is exactly right. Yeah. that was one of the things that motivated me to write this book is that I would love to see us move to a space where we can talk about the rules that we've learned [00:16:00] in school, we can talk about formal conventions of edited standardized prose in a way that is more generous, that is fun, that is kinder and more inclusive to everyone. And it's very possible to do, and you can still learn those conventions and decide when you want to apply them. But there's a way to do that will, that will help people feel included and engage their curiosity about language.
Aven: 100%. So let's talk about the book I was going to also ask you about your, public linguistics work in general, but we can come back to some of the other stuff you do, because it seems to me, and forgive me if I'm putting words in your mouth, but that this is of a piece with the impetus behind all the sort of public outreach you've done over your career. It, feels like this book is very much about wanting to open up those conversations that so often are closed off.
Anne: That's exactly right. So you're welcome to put those words in my [00:17:00] mouth. . I have loved doing public facing linguistic work for years now.
I have had the opportunity to do a very short little radio show on Michigan Public, which is our local NPR affiliate, for 12 years now.
So every Sunday morning for four to five minutes, I get to share a little bit of, as I call it, random linguistic information. And a few years ago, I met a woman who lives in Southeast Michigan and she said, I listened to you every Sunday and I've realized that what you're telling me is that I could just chill out about language a little bit.
And I thought, that's actually exactly what I'm telling you. I'm never saying that, exactly. But I am going through different questions about where does a word come from, or how is that word pronounced? And I'm pulling back the curtain on how do we decide how a word is pronounced? Look at all the ways that language changes over [00:18:00] time.
Look how quaint we're going to look in a hundred years about the thing we think is awful, because here's someone a hundred years ago who thought this was awful. And now they look great. Look how silly they look. And by telling those stories week after week, it helps people think a little bit more generously with a little bit more curiosity about language.
And one of the fun things about writing the book, and there were many, many fun things about writing the book, was coming up with some of the analogies. And one that I came up with in writing it was this idea that what we want to be is a, Birder or a bird watcher.
Aven: Mm-Hmm.
Anne: of language. And so when you hear or see something that is new or that is unfamiliar to you, that you can adopt that mentality and ask questions about it.
Where did it come from? How does it work? Who uses it? How long has it been around? As opposed to. [00:19:00] Wanting to kill it.
But you realize that sometimes that can be our first reaction to hearing something new is, ugh. Make it stop.
Aven: Yeah.
Anne: And so that is where the other piece of that is where another theme in the book comes into play, which is this idea that we have in our head, an inner wordie and an inner grammando and the inner wordie, that's the word lover, the language lover. And I really do think we all have one that it may have become very quiet over time or it may be very loud.
Many of us like playing Wordle or Scrabble or Boggle or we rap and we like to pun. We play with language. We're curious about language. We enjoy it. And then there's your little inner grammando. And I'm very honest that I have one too. And grammando, I want to credit Lizzie Skernick, who introduced that [00:20:00] word in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 2012 in the little column, "that should be a word".
And I saw it and I thought, Oh, that should definitely be a word. Because I think it's so much better than grammar police or grammar Nazi, which I really don't like.
Aven: No.
Anne: And so a grammando is someone who corrects other people's grammar, or I would say just is cranky about some of the things happening in the language.
And so we each have this inner grammando. We're going to hear some things in the language and think, Oh, I wish the language wasn't like that or wasn't changing that way.
And then the question becomes, what do you do with that feeling? Do you express it? Or do you let your inner wordie and inner grammando have a little conversation about what you're going to do with that feeling?
Aven: Yeah, I think that's always a really important point and I think you make it really well in the book that it's okay to have those feelings, because I think once you kind of get exposed to the sort of descriptivism approach and you can kind of almost flip too far where you feel like an awful [00:21:00] person, if you, do have language peeves, or if you don't want to use some words yourself or whatever.
And I think it's it's okay to say to yourself, no, I'm allowed, like, I also have opinions about colors I wear and don't wear. I'm allowed to not like puce, you know, like, it's okay, the word or the color for that matter. But it's, do I go up to people on the street and tell them that's a horrible color?
Why are you wearing it? You're bad. No, I don't do that. I choose not to wear it myself. And it's what do you translate from the inner? You're allowed to feel it. It's okay. You're not a bad person. Just what you choose to do with that. That's where it becomes maybe you are a bad person.
Anne: Right. Well, and with language, I think because many of us got a certain amount of training along the way in school, from parents, from other places, that some things in language are right and some things are wrong. Our inner grammando has those ideas that no, no, no, that is wrong. And one of the questions we need to ask, and this is of course, the title of the book,
is, [00:22:00] says who? We need to check ourselves to see if we're right, because some of those rules are not well founded. And of course, some of them, as I have discovered and continue to discover, even now, that I will have some leftover rule in my head that I picked up along the way about what is good or bad in formal written English.
And then I will go investigate it and discover that it is not well founded.
I mean, I had a student, this is now probably 15 years ago, but for whatever reason, I had gotten it into my head that I really thought it was better that If you have an animate antecedent, a human antecedent, they should have who, so the student who, the person who, and not the student that, or the person that.
And so I would underline this in students writing, and I, if they used a that, I would underline it. I don't cross it out, but I would underline it, and I'd put a little who over it. And then at some point, one of my [00:23:00] graduate students said, came up to me and said, why do you keep underlining this? It is perfectly acceptable to use that, which of course it absolutely is.
And as a historian of the language, I should have known better because we've been doing that for centuries and style guides even allow it. And I had just gotten this in my head. That it was better to use who than that, and I was helpfully conveying that information to students and I had not checked myself to make sure that I was right.
Mark: Yeah it's, sometimes hard to spot these things because they become such second nature. And unless you sort of force yourself to, to stop and think, well, wait a minute, why am I saying that?
One of the things that, occurs to me is that I think people are more and more becoming aware of the categories of prescriptivism and descriptivism. Do you think that changes people's reaction to this push and pull when they have those categories [00:24:00] available to them as a lens?
Anne: I think it can really help. And I love your optimism that more and more people are aware of those categories. And I certainly think that's true to some extent. I still see in the teaching I'm doing that a lot of my students are encountering this for the first time in college if they take a linguistics course.
Although some, a few of them will have encountered it before, which is great. I think one of the things that really helps with is giving people a sense that there are different kinds of rules when I was growing up, the only kind of rules that I knew existed about language were the prescriptive rules. And no one had ever highlighted for me the rules in the sense of all the patterns of my knowledge about language. And I think it's very empowering for everyone to see all the knowledge, all of the systematicity involved in language and realize what a tiny percentage [00:25:00] of language the prescriptive rules cover.
Right.
And then one of my favorite books, which you both may know, is Verbal Hygiene by Deborah Cameron, published in the mid nineties.
And one of the things I love about that book is the way that she then troubles the descriptive prescriptive binary that we use a lot in linguistics in saying that even descriptivism is at some level a prescriptive act because what linguists are often saying is a descriptive approach is a better way to think about language because it's linguistically informed and we think that's better.
And she shifts the question in a way that I have found very helpful over the last 30 years, which is let's not ask, should we prescribe? Because it seems to be part of human communities that we're going to prescribe about speech, but who prescribes for whom, on what grounds, for what [00:26:00] purposes.
Aven: Right.
Anne: And I love that because it helps us then think about Something like asking people to use.
singular they as a more inclusive pronoun as a gender neutral pronoun and as a respectful pronoun as a non binary pronoun, that is of course a prescriptive move. But then the question is on what grounds for what purposes? And I would say with gender neutral they on very solid historical linguistic grounds and for good purposes in that it actually works quite well. Rhetorically, it's efficient and it's already thoroughly embedded in the spoken language.
Aven: Mm. for what many people agree to be, humane and, and respectful reasons, which is, why we also don't speak slurs and why even the most descriptivist linguist is not going to say that it is correct to use racial slurs in, you know, any context, necessarily. They will have a moral judgment about that. [00:27:00] I think that's okay.
Anne: That's right. and absolutely. So singular non-binary, they is about respect. Mm-Hmm. . And if someone says, my pronoun is they, it is respectful to use their pronoun. And as you were talking about earlier, when you talk with young people, if they have grown up in communities or in schools where they have friends and classmates who use they as a pronoun, it is now part of their grammar.
Aven: Yeah. Yeah.
Anne: Absolutely. And some of them look at some of us who are of a particular age and say, why is this so hard for you? And I say, well, cause it wasn't part of my grammar growing up. Gender neutral they was part of my grammar as in A teacher should learn their students names or someone who knows where they're going should give us directions.
That they has always been in my grammar, but singular non binary they, I'm adding to my grammar and that takes a little bit of time. Exactly.
Mark: And I suppose when you think about it, even with [00:28:00] descriptivism, there is a kind of unstated recommendation there that you try to sound like everyone else, right?
You do the most common thing. But that's still in a sense, a kind of Prescription, right? You know, try and sound alike.
Aven: Yeah, because grammar, by a descriptivist rule, grammar is the thing that sounds appropriate to the common or native or first language speakers, whatever determination you use, and says, okay, whatever feels grammatical to that group counts as grammar.
Well, that's still, that's just majority. voting.
Anne: Right. I mean, it's convention, right? It's the, it's the social convention that is critical to language being able to work.
Aven: Yeah. I mean, it is foundational to what language is, so it's not wrong, but it's still prescriptive. Yeah.
Anne: Well, so I think, and one of the things Deborah Cameron's trying to point out is that as soon as you have a community of speakers, you're going to have some speakers telling other speakers what to do [00:29:00] with the language.
And we see that, you know, kids laughing at each other on the playground, if somebody uses slang wrong or what, like there's all this kind of informal prescriptivism that happens and then there's the institutionalized prescriptivism that happens. And then she points out that for linguists, when we say we think descriptivism is a better approach to just recognize that we, that we are well justified, I think, but that we are Making a prescriptive move when we say that,
Aven: right?
Absolutely. On that note of prescriptive usage or prescribing usage. I should perhaps, we can spend just a little bit longer on, on the actual format of your book and, you know, what it is actually doing, because you call it a usage guide. And I assume that you're inserting yourself into what is a long history of usage guides for English and other languages.
And I think that's notable because we've talked to a number of people who [00:30:00] have, you know, similar, overall goals, which is sort of deconstructing our assumptions about how language use works. And I think it's an interesting line that you're walking because you're kind of highlighting that tension between prescriptive and non prescriptive approaches to language, or descriptive, by making a usage guide that is undermining, in one way the usage guides that have come before, or questioning, shall we say, or a usage guide that isn't trying to guide usage, except it is.
So, you know, answer that. That wasn't a question, but you know what I mean.
Anne: Yes, no, very well put. and I think that the funner in the subtitle, a kinder funner usage guide for everyone who cares about words is suggesting to people, this guide is going to be irreverent. It's going to push on some of the conventions and some of what you think you know about what's right and wrong in language.
It was a very [00:31:00] deliberate decision. It's Interesting. This is a line I've been walking pretty much my entire career. I'm trained as a linguist. I study the history of the English language. My appointment is in an English department. I have run the writing program for years. I did that in the 2000s. And so I, one of my responsibilities as an English professor is making sure that students control the conventions that they want to control to have access to particular opportunities that they may want. I also don't want to do that using the language of right and wrong in ways that are, not linguistically true. So I have spent my career trying to figure out how do you talk about and give students access to formal, standardized, edited varieties of writing while also allowing students to ask [00:32:00] questions like says who, and do I have to do that?
Where did that rule come from? What if I want to push on those conventions? And I. I just think that part of being a really effective, savvy writer is caring deeply about language and recognizing that you're making choices. So my hope is that this book is highlighting those kinds of choices that we get to make and that they are choices.
It's not just this is right and this is wrong. It's this may be what some of your audience expects in this genre. is that what you want to do? What are the consequences if you don't? And that caring about language is being interested in those choices as opposed to just knowing that is right and that is wrong and then gatekeeping around that.
So, I wanted to write a usage guide to intervene in this discourse in the same way that for many years I was on the American Heritage Dictionary usage panel.
Aven: Yes.
Anne: Until [00:33:00] it was disbanded in 2018, which was so heartbreaking. But I was asked to join that panel in 2005. And I really thought about it when I was asked, because that panel was created by American Heritage.
in the late sixties as a response to Webster's third, the very controversial dictionary, dictionary gate that was seen as too descriptive, too permissive. And American Heritage in response said, well, we're going to have this usage panel that will tell you what's acceptable and not acceptable. And so when I was invited to join, I thought, do I want to be part of that?
And I decided that I did because people do look to dictionaries as a place to get authoritative answers. And they do look at those usage notes and it says something like 70 percent of the panel rejected this sentence. And first of all, I wanted to be a voice on that panel who could be [00:34:00] more open minded about language change and linguistic diversity so that I could affect what percentage was rejected.
Aven: Make it 68%. Yeah.
Anne: and that panel was known to be fairly conservative, not very diverse. So I wanted to get on there to be able to do that. And then it has also allowed me in my work, including in this book, to talk about what is that panel? How does it work? And how can those usage notes actually be helpful?
Because I think that they can, it's more information for you as a speaker and writer. It is helpful to know if 70%, 80 percent of a panel of conservative speakers is saying, We don't like this. It doesn't mean it's wrong, but sometimes I will talk about the crankiness meter. And it means that in some formal context where you can anticipate a more conservative audience, people may be cranky about this.
That's worth knowing. And then you can make a decision about what you want to do as [00:35:00] a speaker or writer.
Mark: Yeah. and that's something that I also really like about your book is that you don't give an answer. the answer to the question is really a discussion and knowing the ins and outs of, how these things work and how people, use these, types of constructions allows the writer to make their own decision rather than spoon feeding them a right and wrong.
Anne: That's right. And, and I'm sure there are readers who find that frustrating and I get it. I do try to clarify when I think a rule is helpful.
And in that way, I'm trying to move us away from right and wrong to talk more about clarity, rhetorical effectiveness, purpose. So for example, Rules about dangling modifiers. Those can be helpful in writing because some dangling modifiers or misplaced modifiers will be confusing in writing [00:36:00] and you're not there to clarify.
Most of the time in speech, we don't even notice them because the context clarifies what we meant. But in writing, That's a place to be careful. And so those rules are helpful. I think understanding how the passive works and going back and looking in your writing at all the places you've used the passive voice to say, is this an effective use of the passive voice?
Or do I want an agent here? Would this work better with an agent? That's, I think, a really helpful exercise to make your prose rhetorically effective. But you'll notice in none of that am I saying, because the passive is wrong or because dangling modifiers are wrong. It's because dangling modifiers can be ambiguous and it's helpful if your written prose minimizes ambiguity.
So let's pay attention to that.
Aven: Yeah, and in that sense, it is a usage guide. And I I also appreciate that it's not, and there's nothing wrong with this as a [00:37:00] genre either, but I said it undermined previous usage guides, but I don't want to make an overstatement. It is not, just like you just said, just you exploding language myths.
Right? It's not, there's nothing wrong with that, but, and some of what you're doing is certainly that, but it's not only that. You're not in every case saying, everybody else is wrong. Here's what's really true. You know all the other usage guides say this, but it's not true. Yes, many of the ones you're talking about, you are explaining and exploring where these rules came from and where they may be appeared out of thin air, essentially, or out of one, cranky guy's brain.
But in other cases, you're saying, no, this is where it came from. And this has been true of standard English and maybe it's moving or changing now and that's something to be aware of. Or maybe it's only true in these cases and it's been over generalized, but there is actually some foundation to it.
So, it's much more nuanced than just here's the 10 zombie rules that don't, aren't true and you don't need to follow them anymore.
Anne: I'm really glad that that's [00:38:00] how the book felt to you because that's exactly what I wanted it to do which is, yes, to explode some myths and provide some counterexamples, but also to provide what I hope will be useful and more nuanced advice.
And we can think about a rule like don't split an infinitive, which is not well founded. You can split infinitives in English. That said, putting a whole lot of words between the two and the verb. may not be great for your reader.
Aven: Yeah, this is not German. You can't actually separate your prefix from your main verb by six clauses.
Anne: So, again, I'm not saying it's wrong to put a long adverbial between the two and the verb, but might not be ideal. Mm
Aven: hmm. But it has a particular effect and it would be good to know what that effect is before you do it. Yeah.
Mark: Yeah. I mean, you want to have all the tools in the toolbox. It's a question of, in the moment deciding which is the appropriate tool to use.
Aven: Mm hmm. And [00:39:00] sometimes, you know, you talked about the ambiguity. In general, we talk about ambiguity as something to be avoided and we are trying for clarity. that is definitely not always true. And it's sometimes nice to know how to obfuscate the agent, or how to leave an ambiguity between which part of your body is being referred to when you modify it with aching, or, you know, whatever, right?
And whether that's in prose for nefarious or other reasons, or whether it's in poetry, because you want to have those kinds of effects, or whatever, learning about an effect is bad or not bad, but like creates an ambiguity in an unfortunate way in some circumstances. It's also on the flip side, learning how to use it to create that exact same ambiguity if you want it.
Anne: And I wish that we talked about this more with emerging writers. Yeah. Because It is one of the things that makes writing hard is that our speech can tolerate more ambiguity. And one of the things we're being asked to do as [00:40:00] writers is minimize ambiguity. Ambiguity. And no one ever said that to me. Mm hmm.
Aven: Yeah, it's a really straightforward thing to say. Look, it's fine to say that because you said it in a certain tone of voice, in a certain context, to a certain audience, and everybody knew what you meant. that's not there in writing. Please make it clear. Because we use the word clearer a lot. And I mean, I'm just as guilty of this, you know, not clear, unclear, unclear, make this clear, clarify.
I don't know how many forms of that verb I have used in, marginal notes in my life. And that's not very clear. What do I mean by clarify?
Anne: I think it just also usefully acknowledges. Learning to write clearly and rhetorically effectively is hard, and it's something that most of us hone. for much of our lives.
I think for many of us [00:41:00] who have written books or articles, the first one was not the best one.
Aven: Yeah, I think I can 100 percent guarantee that is true for me.
Anne: It is definitely true for me.
Aven: And the first draft was not the best draft. That's right. Yeah. all of these things. Yeah, exactly.
Mark: Yeah. I mean, writing is not a natural thing in a sense, right?
You don't absorb the ability to write in the way that, we learn to speak simply by having input. And so it shouldn't be surprising that it takes some work. Right.
Anne: And then one of the things that was fun about the book was getting to celebrate some of the changes in the language that are coming from the book.
Kids, as they learn the language from the spoken input all around them and changing it because, and I love the description that linguists will sometimes use of, you know, every baby is reinventing the language as they learn it. And [00:42:00] it helps explain something like the new verb, verse, as in play against, which from everything I can tell is back formed from the Latin versus.
I think it's terrific. When it was first brought to my attention, it was by parents who said, Ann, what is going on with the verb, verse? Make it stop. And of course, my reaction was. That is so cool. What a great example of back formation.
Aven: Exactly.
Anne: And of course, funner in the subtitle of my book is also coming from kids who are trying to make fun, now that it's an adjective, behave like other one syllable adjectives.
And they will therefore say fun, funner, funnest, just like tall, taller, tallest, until some authority figure says, Oh, don't say funner. That's a terrible word. But as we all know, in general, kids win. Over the long term, [00:43:00] they win.
Mark: it's so funny the way that, people will get all excited and happy to learn, some German word that fills a linguistic gap, that says something that you want to be able to say, but there's no other way to say it.
And yet when we do it, when we do it by innovating in English, many people you know, react negatively to that.
Aven: Yeah. They'd only just found a German word for playing somebody, playing against somebody. They'd say,
Mark: it's great.
Aven: They'd be like, wow, German has all the best words.
Anne: And this is where I love. studying the history of English and being someone who studies not only what happens in the language, but I also study the history of attitudes over time.
And I include a lot of this in the book of quotes from earlier grammarians who are worried about donate as a verb or notice as a verb or the passive progressive or whatever it was that they thought was just terrible and was going to be the downfall of [00:44:00] English. And we look at it and think, what in the world was wrong with you that you thought that was so wrong?
And it helps create that perspective when we're saying, Oh, verse, that is just terrible. These young people are ruining the language; to say, in a hundred years, verse is going to be completely standard.
Aven: Old fashioned even. Yes.
Anne: Yeah. And people are going to look at our email trails or our blog posts and think, what were those people so upset about?
Aven: I think that is one of the funnest parts of your book for sure, is the quotes from the old peevers because first of all, because it seems so absurd, of course, like the one you were just talking about, the, Passive progressive. The house is being built was
Anne: It's one of my favorites.
Aven: Yeah. That that was the most abhorrent thing that had ever happened to the English language.
How could anyone do that instead of the house is building? Which not only sounds weird, like, it's not only weird that they didn't like the new one. But now that old one is gone. Like, except in certain dialects, there are dialects [00:45:00] that still use it. But basically, like, to me, that would be incomprehensible.
The house is building. It's not just that it would sound weird. I wouldn't know what it meant. That's right. That's how completely it's been replaced.
Anne: That's right. And that's why I think that example is so powerful that when I share it with audiences and they say, well, then if you couldn't say the house is being built, what would you say?
And I say, the house is building. And they just look at you like, yeah, no, that's not how you say that. Yeah. Like it is how they did say it. It is how English speakers said this until we had the passive progressive. Yeah.
Aven: And also it's just funny because they write such impassioned, excited things.
And then you recognize yourself in it because you realize that I have said something exactly like that about something recently or whatever.
Anne: Right. Well, I tell the story on myself of my reaction to the business y use of double click. And I had a colleague in the business school here and he used that verb a lot, particularly when he was doing [00:46:00] PowerPoint presentations.
And it was the way that he transitioned from slide to slide. He used it to mean dig deeper into or delve into. So there'd be a slide with three bullet points, and then he would introduce those. And then he'd say, let's double click on the first one. And that would be the transition to the next slide. And my inner grammando went Nuts, and just, this is so business jargony.
I don't like this. And I came home and usually I keep my inner grammando, pretty quiet. But for whatever reason, at dinner I was telling my partner about double click and how annoying it was , and he looks at me and says. I actually think it's quite clever and my inner commando just stopped talking immediately because of course he was right.
It's actually kind of a great metaphor.
Aven: And it's quick, and it's short, and it's comprehensible in the context.
Anne: And clearly memorable. Yeah,
Aven: [00:47:00] yeah, I must admit that I recently, about a year and a bit ago, made a transition from being an academic to being a professor. being a government worker. I now work for the federal government.
And of course, academia has jargon up the wazoo and no question about it, but it is my jargon. It was dear to my heart. And now I'm in a world of the corporate jargon and specifically government jargon, which is its own thing too. And over the summer, I saw some friends who've been in government all their life and I was talking to them and I was using the terms and they just, one of them stopped at one point and said, Oh my goodness, you've only been doing this six months.
It's so weird to hear these words coming out of your mouth, throwing around the, the acronyms and the jargon and then the circling
Anne: back and the,
Aven: and, and I mean, part of me does, you know, you know, they're very repetitive, right? You say the same things over and over and over again, and there is a real kind of gratingness to that, just that, Can I not write an email that does [00:48:00] not use the same words the same way that I've written the last five emails?
But of course, no, there's a reason you do that. It's, everybody knows exactly what you mean. It's efficient. It gets it done. Let's move on. So I struggle with it some days with realizing how quickly you fall into these cliches, which is what they are, but what else is language for?
than to communicate what you want to communicate in the most efficient manner possible. that's what it does. So there you go. That's what it is. But yeah, every so often I do still watch the TikToks that make fun of the language. I won't, I won't deny it. The corporate girlies and their language.
Mark: Human beings are actually really good at learning language. And we do sort of accommodate to the way The people around us speak, so, you know, it happens automatically. Yeah, exactly.
Aven: So one thing I want to bring up in the vein of telling on yourself is one of the things that made me laugh really hard is one of the things about my government work, you know, I'm moving in and reading a bunch of other people's writing and [00:49:00] I can't help it. I have judgments about their writing in some form or another.
And I was noticing that a couple of my colleagues kept capitalizing the next word after a colon, I corrected it every time and I was tut tut tutting to myself because it was the younger members, and I open your book and the first thing that strikes me almost is your prose also does that, you capitalize the first word after a colon, and I say you, I realize it's undoubtedly your typesetter as much as anything else, and I immediately thought, all right.
Well, I need to question my assumptions here because I had just assumed it was completely incorrect and I realized it had to be either either a change in styles or a style choice I didn't know about and I'd been wrong all along. So I'm going to ask you if you have a view and then you even have a chapter about capitalization rules. And you do mention the sort of basic rules about capitalization, and then you talk about nouns. In particular, your chapter is focused on the inconsistencies around when we capitalize [00:50:00] nouns and the history of capitalizing nouns in much different ways, which is all very interesting.
But you don't talk about the capital letter after colon. So am I hopelessly old fashioned before thinking that was, like, at one point, not the correct capitalization? Or do you have any opinion on it at all?
Anne: Well, Of course I have opinions. Very strong opinions about capitalization. So as far as I know, different style guides advise different things about whether to use a capital after a colon.
And I also was trained not to use a capital letter after a colon. And then when I was writing for Lingua Franca for the Chronicle of Higher Education, their style guide was very clear that we had to use a capital after a colon. And I think that that got me used to using a capital letter after a colon.
So I don't think there's any right or wrong there. I think that is different style guides do different things. Right. But as you saw in that chapter on capitalization, if I had my way, we would do a few things differently [00:51:00] in capitalization, because I do think it is confusing that we could talk about Dean Smith with a capital D, but then if we're referring to Dean Smith, and we say the Dean, it's not capitalized.
And I think that is a very strange thing to do.
Aven: Well, I mean, I am fully on board with capitalization rules in English are a hodgepodge and there's no perfect consistency in it because there's too many different rules from different periods that have kind of gotten all mudged up together.
So I don't know, sometimes I think we should just go back to the capitalize every important word as your heart desires approach, because then nobody would be wrong. It would be fine.
Anne: Well, and what I like is just helping people see that some of these written conventions
remain in flux. Yeah. So capitalization will continue to shift and that's fine.
Aven: Yeah. I will stop correcting my colleagues on that one because clearly some style guides, though I could, of course, because it is [00:52:00] the federal government, I could 100 percent go and look at their style guide because they will have a rule about it.
There is, we have a whole online style usage guide that. you know, prescribes all the things. Some of them are not important. Some of them are important. It is important if, you know, we, we have our ways of referring to individual groups, you know, Indigenous, capitalized, and things like that. Like some of these things are very important that the government get it right.
Others are, just, trying for consistency, but we also get the fun in Canada of having to do that in both languages. So I also have to consult the formal usage guides for French and we're talking about English, so we won't open that particular can of worms, but boy, oh boy, you want to talk prescriptivism.
That's right. We've got nothing on the French language.
Mark: So kind of getting back to the book specifically how did you go about deciding which topics to cover? And, I'm sort of imagining that at least part of this is [00:53:00] kind of coming from the teaching side of things, right? You see either the spots where, people are either unsure or you see a lot of variation. So did you kind of make a list of these are some of the possible things to cover in the book? Or like, how did you go about, doing that?
Anne: Yeah. So the list in some ways started from just years of experience as a teacher and from the public intellectual work that I've been doing. What are the questions that audience members tend to ask me? What are the peeves that they share with me that they want to hear about? And there were ones that I would hear over and over again.
And so that was the core of the list. The radio show has also been very helpful in terms of what do people write in about, or when I talk about it on the radio, what gets a particularly strong response because people are very sensitized or interested in that issue. So it started from there. And then as often happens, as you write something, I would realize, Oh, those [00:54:00] two usage issues could go into the same chapter because they're linked.
I can just talk about adverbs generally, and then I can cover all of those. And then sometimes I'd be writing about something and it would, in my head, lead me to another set of usage issues. And I would think, Oh, there's a new chapter that I want to address. So coming from just a lot of experience talking about these issues of where are people particularly interested, knowing that I can use any one of those to get at a range of deeper or wider issues through that particular peeve or usage rule. And also knowing that of course I can't tackle all of it. So I'm going to take on some. And then, as I say in the last chapter in the epilogue, we're all going to continue to encounter these questions. And what I hope the book has done is give people a different set of tools and questions to come at whatever the usage issue is, because there's a lot we can [00:55:00] learn on our own by going to different dictionaries and different usage guides, looking at an online database.
There's a lot that we can learn ourselves.
Aven: Right. So a methodology as well as a usage guide.
Anne: I hope so.
Aven: a small ambition.
And maybe we'll close with this question. I think you touched on it already. I think you've brought it up by talking about the radio and, your students. we've, spoken to a number of people on these topics. And I think, I mean, the, thinking among linguists has certainly, I don't even want to say changed because I think linguists were never prescriptivist, at once they were linguists as opposed to grammarians and the other things.
But certainly the thinking among, scholars is been very clear on sort of what language change is and the issues of linguistic discrimination. And a shout out there to the Vocal Fries. I know you've been on their podcast and I can't say the phrase linguistic discrimination without thinking of Carrie and Megan.
But those issues are, [00:56:00] widely accepted among the scholarly community. But have you seen, or do you think, and you talked about this a little bit with the idea of descriptivist and prescriptivist, and if that language is getting widely known, do you think there is a change? Are people feeling, do you think a message about Linguistic discrimination is an issue and thinking about grammar and language as wrong and right is classist and racist and sexist and all of those things, even if you don't always put it in such judgmental terms.
I realize that's not always a good way to change hearts and minds. Do you think that message is getting out there? Do you see any of that in your students and in the public that you interact with, really, at this point?
Anne: I think it is. I think the fact that we have now terrific podcasts, yours among them, that are trying to get this information out there, it really matters.
And one of the things that I have been trying to do is say, we need to start from a place of taking people's worries about language seriously, that [00:57:00] people are worried that English is decaying. this is going to be a terrible thing for English, that this is right and this is wrong. And to start as a linguist, by taking that seriously, they have been taught this by people they trust and then to start to open up different ways of thinking about it.
and I always want to, and that's where, for example, inner commando was really helpful to me to, as you said, to naturalize this response that sometimes we're not going to like it. And we learned these rules in school. I did too. My mother was a very prescriptive person about grammar and I learned all these rules growing up and she would edit my papers so that they would use all the commas in a particular way. And then what I love doing is opening up the space for different ways of thinking, for more inclusive ways of thinking. And that's where I think we do have a real opportunity here, which is a lot of people are focused on, Access and [00:58:00] inclusion and diversity and to recognize that diversity in language is part of the diversity of us and language change is a natural part of a language and that we can adopt these more generous ways of thinking about linguistic diversity and language change as part of broader efforts toward creating more inclusive spaces.
Aven: Well, I think I don't want to top that. I think that's an absolutely wonderful message on which to end. And I think it sums up the book which people who like, you know, I think our audience doesn't need a lot of persuasion, I hope, on the general theme of your book. But I do think that people will enjoy learning the details yeah.
Mark: That is the wonderful thing about the book is, as I say, it doesn't just give a short answer. It gives the full discussion and history. And historical
Aven: context.
Mark: And context. So I, think This is a book that will be appreciated by a wide [00:59:00] variety of people.
Mm-Hmm. ,
Aven: the people who care about the fact Grammando is a perfect term, not only because it hits commando, but because it has a gerund in it. And the Grammando was the one who was telling you how grammar ought to be used. , I mean sorry, that just, I had, that had to come out. So if you care about such things.
this is going to delight you. And also, I will say, it's nice and easy, you know, you've got the broken into these very little chapters with very clear signposting and it makes it just a very easy thing to pick up and read and I really appreciated that as well.
Anne: Oh, thank you for the generous words and thank you for inviting me to join you.
This has been a wonderful conversation.
Aven: Oh, it's been a great pleasure. Yes. Thank you. If people want to find you, I will put the links to your University of Michigan page, is there's somewhere else that people should look for you online, if they'd like to follow and hear more from you?
Anne: I have a website at annecurzan. com and they can find me on Instagram at annecurzan.
Aven: There you go. All right. So I'll put those links in the show notes as always, and it's "says who a [01:00:00] kinder, funner usage guide for everyone who cares about words" and everyone listening to this cares about words. So you have your marching orders. Thank you so much.
Thank you both.
For more information on this podcast, check out our website, www.alliterative.net, where you can find links to the videos, blog posts, sources and credits, and all our contact info.
Mark: And please check out our Patreon where you can pledge to support this show and our video project. You can go directly to the videos at youtube.com/alliterative.
Aven: Our email is on the website, but the easiest way to get in touch with us is Twitter. I'm at @AvenSarah, A V E N S A R A H,
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It helps us a lot.
We'll be back soon with more musings about the connections around us. Thanks for listening.
Mark: [01:01:00] Bye.