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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When you’re smack dab in the middle of something, you can’t be more in the middle of it. -
English spelling can be a museum of earlier pronunciations, as we see in words like "night," "through," and "cough."
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Given that tuna is a fish, it can seem unnecessary to call that out in the compound tuna fish.
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When we eat up or fix up or heal up or hurry up, we’re not actually moving in an upward direction.
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Funnily enough, two listeners wrote to us this summer about the phrase funnily enough.
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Working out with dumbbells may be a fitness craze now, but the fitness craze that started it all sounds even better.
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If you’d just as soon not learn about an eggcorn that some language pundits really dislike, then you might want to stop reading now.
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We can be angry or infuriated or outraged or furious or livid or incensed, all of which make us fit to be tied.
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Usage guide writers, seeing some confusion afoot, tell us to be wary about the distinction between "wary” and “weary.”
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Even though "mug shots" do not involve drinking or "mugs" in that sense, we can draw a historical connection between these two mugs.
