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).
-
This is a bespoke segment of That’s What They Say that focuses on “bespoke.” -
If it’s up your alley, it might also be up your street. And perhaps it’s down rather than up.
-
You say "lieutenant," I say “leftenant” but let’s not call the whole thing off.
-
There’s more than one way to be wonky, and not all of them are bad.
-
Adverbs don’t always get a lot of love, captured powerfully in the writing tip “Abolish the adverbs.”
-
We scrimp and we save, and we skimp and we still save, which makes one wonder whether scrimping is different from skimping
-
Cheesemongers sell cheese, and gossipmongers usually start the gossip or spread it, rather than sell it.
-
Many of us don’t talk about doornails very often, but sometimes we will when things are really, well, dead.
-
If you know how the sound "f" worked in Old English, it suddenly isn’t mysterious why the "f" in "leaf" turns into a "v" in the plural form "leaves."
-
