Anne Curzan
Contributor, That’s What They SayAnne Curzan is the Geneva Smitherman Collegiate Professor of English and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan. She also holds faculty appointments in the Department of Linguistics and the School of Education.
As an expert in the history of the English language, Anne describes herself as a fount of random linguistic information about how English works and how it got to be that way. She received the University’s Henry Russel Award for outstanding research and teaching in 2007, as well as the Faculty Recognition Award in 2009 and the 2012 John Dewey Award for undergraduate teaching.
Anne has published multiple books and dozens of articles on the history of the English language (from medieval to modern), language and gender, and pedagogy. Her newest book is Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History (2014). She has also created three audio/video courses for The Great Courses, including “The Secret Life of Words” and “English Grammar Boot Camp.”
When she is not tracking down new slang or other changes in the language, Anne can be found running around Ann Arbor, swimming in pools both indoor and out, and now doing yoga (in hopes that she can keep running for a few more years to come).
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Social media has made a couple of longstanding English verbs work or mean differently. -
If you want to pronounce "homage" to a tee, it may depend what you mean.
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As we live our lives, there's some new slang words that can help us narrate it as we go. That is, if we're in a demographic that allows us to use slang credibly.
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We don’t all agree on whether or not we should correct the phrasing "whether or not."
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We can talk about sending emails back and forth. But why does it sound odd to talk about sending them forth and back?
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Given that “tuna” is a fish, some may find it unnecessary to call out that fact out in the compound “tuna fish.” For others, “fish” may be an important distinction.
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You can be prone to do something, whether you're lying down or not.
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There’s evidence of a new peeve arising. This one is focused on “training” as a countable noun.
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Lots of people don't like the redundancy in "irregardless." However, no one's fussy about the redundancy in a phrase like "a friend of mine."
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An ouster can be an act of ousting, or it can be the one who does the ousting. But we seem to have opted for one of those meanings over the other.
