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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An evening of drinking beer and talking about grammar? Yes please.Last week, we were thrilled to dust off our pint glasses and host another Grammar Night… -
Today we’ll dispose of not one but two listener questions. No, that doesn’t mean we’re going to throw their questions away. It means we’ll use the…
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To know or to beknow? That is, well, not actually the question. However, there is some debate over whether something is “unbeknown” or…
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If you have an older sister, you can also have an elder sister. However, if you have an older house, you don’t also have an elder house. We’ll talk about…
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During the pandemic, many of us have spent much of our time at home cleaning out closets, basements and garages, getting rid of things we no longer use or…
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It can be helpful, as well as potentially confusing, to have vague expressions of time such as “by and by.”The more we thought about this expression, the…
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In honor of tax season, Merriam Webster recently tweeted the origins of “mortgage.” It’s derived from two Old French words meaning “death” and…
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We're not exactly sure what effect the internet and other changes in technology are having on English. It could be that changes in the language are…
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It's clearly different to talk about a large country and the country at large, but these two meanings of "large" are historically related.A listener named…
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Something that’s out of your hands is different from something that’s out of hand, which is usually different from something that’s offhand. So which…
