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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The word "kid" is already informal, and now we have the word "kiddo" living alongside it. -
When it comes to media, here's the message: It’s time for a truce between the singular agreement people and the plural agreement people.
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If you are trying to do good in the world, some would now argue it’s better to be a “good doer” than a “do gooder.”
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It is less ambiguous to say “I badly need to shower” than it is to say “I need to shower badly.”
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There’s the hair on our heads and the hares in our yards, and there has been some confusion about which one is part of the expression "harebrained."
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We can presume things, which may or may not be presumptuous. We can also assume things, which then raises the question of whether things can be "assumptuous."
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For those of us of a certain age, if we whack a tennis ball or a softball too hard or at the wrong angle, we could throw our back out of whack.
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We sometimes talk about stealing or robbery in terms of "lifting" things, and this is relevant to "heists" as well.
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We will never know some of the informal language that was bandied about among speakers in the time of Beowulf.
