[0:00]in case you were wondering, I quite like the Oxford comma. See, and this is what, oh see, I'm with my people. You say Oxford comma and I can get applause for that.
[0:18]Greetings, fellow humans, and thanks for checking out Chicago Humanities Tapes. The spot for the biggest names and brightest minds, direct from the Chicago Humanities live spring and fall festivals to your ears. I'm Alisa Rosenthal, and today, linguist and veteran English professor Ann Curzan has insight into your favorite language pet peeves. We're talking these ones, the history of Dilly Dally, the contentious sneaked versus snuck, or would it be sneaked versing snuck? All the greatest hits. Ann Curzan is the Geneva Smitherman collegiate professor of English, linguistics, and education at the University of Michigan. Where she also currently serves as the dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. She can be found talking about language on the weekly show That's What They Say, on local NPR affiliate Michigan Public. I've linked to her show, as well as her most recent book Says Who, a kinder, funner usage guide for everyone who cares about words, and her viral Ted Talk What Makes a Word Real? in the show notes. So definitely check those out. This is Ann Curzan, live at the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture, as part of the Chicago Humanities Fall Festival in 2024.
[1:39]Thank you, and I want to thank everyone at the Chicago Humanities Festival for inviting me to be here. Of course, there is nothing more human than language, and I'm delighted to get to speak about that here today. I want to thank everyone on the team who's helped organize this visit, um, and who supported me in being here and the tech folks who've made all the technology work, so many, many thanks to everyone involved. So I'm delighted to get to come talk with you about language and about peeves that you may have brought with you today to share with me. It's one of my favorite things. And perhaps questions and concerns, and I hope perhaps some delights like a favorite word or the like. So I am a professor of English at the University of Michigan. I'm a linguist by training, which I study the history of the English language, which means that I study how English got from Beowulf to texting. And if you have not heard Beowulf in a while, I'm just going to recite the first lines, wha. we Gar, in Thud, Who Ellen Framen. So there you go. That's Old English. It sounds very unfamiliar. I studied it in graduate school so I would be able to read it, but if you see it on the page, it looks a little less unfamiliar. So the second word, the first word is what, which actually comes into modern English as what, and the second word is way. Which of course we still have in the language. It's we, had a vowel change in there. Other words have died. So the word Ellen is in there, which meant bravery, and that word just died. And we'll come back to texting. So I am a linguist, I study the history of the language. I am also an English professor. I ran the writing program for many years. And one of my jobs is to make sure that undergraduates at the University of Michigan control standard formal edited English. You will notice that I did not say correct English. I said standard formal edited English, and also give them the tools to ask questions about it, like says who.
[4:10]I am the daughter of a very prescriptive mother. My mother cared deeply about language and that took the form of correcting her children. And so she at the grocery store would point out the sign that said 10 items or less and make sure her daughters knew it should be 10 items or fewer. And she would sit with us at the kitchen table with in junior high school and high school and correct our papers with all those little professional editing marks because she had been a copy editor at various points in her life as well. I also get to host this radio show and give talks about language, which means that people share the things they're worried about in language. I have such a fun job. And one of the things that people have been sharing with me recently is a peeve about these ones. Okay, I'm getting a few head nods. So in case that was the PBU brought with you for the Q&A, let me just address it right now. Because in several talks people said, I just all these people are saying these ones and I hated it. It feels childish, it feels uneducated. It's redundant. You could just say these. So I went to go find out what's going on with that. Well, it turns out first of all, we've been saying these ones for several hundred years. No one seems to be concerned about this one. Right? No one's worried that that's redundant. But if you make it plural, suddenly people don't like it. But it's not that we don't like ones as a plural because we will say those are my loved ones. So one seems to be fine. And it even seems to be okay if you put a modifier in it. If you say, oh, I like these red ones. Not so bad. So people are worried somehow about these ones. Why are people worried about it? Because if you go look, it is suddenly increased in frequency. It is fashionable at the moment. And when things start to increase in frequency, people notice them, and often they go, yuck, stop it. So I have been learning about these ones. And then I also had someone write in to the radio show to say, what is going on with Dilly Dally? Which is a great phrase. Um, so Dilly Dally is a reduplication that functions a little bit like wishy washy, and they mean a little bit the same thing. So if you're dilly dallying, you're idly spending your time, you're loitering, comes from Dally, and it's just reduplicated. So as opposed to Dally Dally, we dilly dally. And while I was looking at Dilly Dally, I started looking at shilly shally. So I don't know if if this one is much less frequent, but it is out there. So to waver to be equivocal to shilly shally, not be able to make up your mind. And this one the etymology is great. So shilly shally comes from shall I, shall I. So it was shall I, shall I, became shall I, shall I, and then became shilly shally. So these are the random facts that I collect and store in my head. Which makes me a very entertaining person at dinner parties. And I was many years ago, I was teaching a class on the history of the language, and I said, I promise you that every day you will get uh, a linguistic random fact, which are great at dinner parties. And this undergraduate raises his hand and he said, what kind of parties do you go to?
[7:26]So, let me start with some changes that are ha with a change that's happening all around us and we're going to quickly move into the participatory part of this program. Which is what is going on with the verb sneak. So the question is what is your past tense of sneak? So here is a sentence, at midnight I
[7:47]Okay. So I love we had a lot of snuck and then one brave person was like, sneaked. Um, so let me try just doing a show of hands here. You've got three choices here, which is snuck, sneaked, or both.
[8:02]So just say it to yourself, how many of you've got snuck? Okay. How many of you got sneaked? Okay. I've got a handful. And how many of you have both? Okay, and when you have people with two variants, it's one of the ways you know there's a change happening, is that you've got two competing forms. Let's see if anything changes when we do the past participle. I don't know how the snake got onto the plane. Someone must have
[8:33]Now and really see welcome to my life. Once you start, you're like, I don't know. I don't know how often do I talk about sneaking snakes on planes. Um, so once again, let's just do a show of hands. How many of you've got snuck here? Sneaked? Both? Okay. So I think we had more snuck than sneaked on that. Let me show you a fascinating clip. Uh but there's a time when you snuck into the room to see what the, I sneaked into the room. Snuck isn't a word, Conan, and you went to Harvard and you should know that. Snuck past and past part of sneak. There is so much happening in that clip. Um, that she stops mid-interview to say, snuck is not a word. Now, of course, it's a word. She knew exactly what it meant. So it's a word. You went to Harvard and you should know that. So there we've got the gatekeeping that goes on and shaming around language. But then what does Conan do? Well, he looks it up in quote unquote the dictionary. Now, we have no idea what dictionary this is. When it was published, who edited it, but it looks like a dictionary, it looks very authoritative and he's like, look, it's in there, therefore it is a word, and then you have to laugh evilly about it. Um, but this is what I would call going grammando on someone, and I'll come back to the word grammando. But first, let me tell you what's going on with this verb. So this verb was a regular verb for most of its life in English. The past tense of sneak was sneaked. And many people, because they know I'm a historian of the language, will say, well, English must just be getting more regular over time. To which I say, it is getting more regular except when it isn't. So in this case, we have taken a regular verb, and in North American English, and I will tell you British speakers see this as a very North American form, we have made it an irregular verb. So you've got no snuck, and then starting in the late mid to um, 20th century, we start to get snuck. And it has taken off and now we've got more snuck than sneaked. Now, I do not know why we are doing more sneaking in general. Right? I mean, there's just an uptick in sneaking, but um, and if you want to waste a lot of time, go to the Google Books Ngram Viewer. Where you can search things and look at their frequency over time. In American English, British English, it's great fun. So in this case, we're witnessing a change in the language with snuck coming into American English, at this point, more common than sneaked. It is absolutely a word. This has happened with other verbs as well. The past tense of dig used to be digged. And there is some question as to what the past tense of dive is. I would guess for most of you it's dove. But for some of you've probably got some lingering dived. So that one again, these were regular verbs that became irregular over time. But I love that clip with Jennifer Garner and Conan O'Brien, because you have her going grammando on him. And this is one of my gifts in the book, and a gift to you, is this word grammando. So it was introduced to me in 2012 in the New York Times Sunday Magazine by Lizzy Skernick, and in the column That should be a word. And as soon as I saw it, I said, that should absolutely be a word and I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure that it catches on. So it is in the book, and she defines it as one who constantly corrects others' linguistic mistakes. And we have the example cowed by his grammando wife, Arthur finally ceased saying irregardless. And I would guess there're some of you who have strong feelings about irregardless, who are clapping at its demise, although it is in most standard dictionaries. And uh, I am aware it is redundant, but there are other redundant words as well. And one of the realizations I came to in writing the book, when I first started the book, I thought, I'm trying to help people who are grammandos become wordies, and I'll come back to the word wordies. But what I came to realize is that we actually all have inner grammandos in our head. They're they're there for all of us. And the question is how loud are they? How much do we listen to them? What do we do what conversation do we have with our inner grammandos? Then because I am from the University of Michigan, I had to share this example of someone going grammando. So this was from a University of Michigan football game earlier this year against USC. And here you have on the board, Lincoln Riley, who is the coach of USC, thinks you're quiet. This was a way to try to rally the crowd so that they would get noisy. Now, I would guess because you are here, you can see the issue. So later in the game, now we spelled it right. Lincoln Riley still thinks you're quiet. Now, I haven't talked to anyone to know exactly what happened, but I would guess that a whole lot of people went grammando on the team up there controlling the scoreboard, and they decided to correct it. Now, I am going to say, if you're controlling the scoreboard, you should get the apostrophe in the standard place. I am also going to say that apostrophes are really confusing. And we should, I think if most of us, if not all of us are honest, we have screwed up our it's and our it's, with an apostrophe and without, when you're typing fast, because there's a good reason it's confusing. People will sometimes make judgments that someone is uneducated because they cannot get their apostrophe in the right place, and I would ask you to be really careful about that. I would guess that many of the smartest people you know, most educated people you know, are bad spellers or bad proof readers or both. One of the most brilliant people I know at the University of Michigan cannot proof read. She is brilliant and her brain just does not work that way. And so, now, I can't help it. I just proof read, which means I'm clearly losing other substantive things because my brain is focused on the apostrophe. So we have this idea of a grammando, and what I like about grammando is it gets us away from grammar police and grammar nazi. I have never liked the phrase grammar nazi. I feel like if we're going to talk about Nazis, we talk about Nazis. Now we have grammando. And once you have grammando, you can talk about going grammando on someone, and I think that is an excellent phrase. So then we have wordy. So this is a relatively new word. It was included in Merriam Webster in 2018. And it's like a foodie except for words. So someone who loves words. And um, I ran into one of you before the talk who said, you know, I I'm pretty sure I'm a wordy. And I would guess all of you are wordies. You're here on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. To think and talk about language, and I actually think that almost all humans are wordies. Humans enjoy language. We're curious about it. We enjoy it. Think how many people play Wordle or spelling bee or Boggle, scrabble, Bananagrams, like to pun, like to rap. We like to play with language. We are also curious about it. When I tell people that I know why Colonel is spelled with an L and pronounced with an R. Everybody's like, I've always wondered about that one. So it is one of the joys of my job is that I am getting to tap into people's curiosity about language. One of the things I worry about is that our educational system often drills that passion and love out. That the way we teach grammar and language can make it seem not fun and can make people feel stupid. And one of the things I'm trying to do is bring that love back. So, as I said, all of us have inner grammandos, uh, including me. And I'm very open about the fact that one of the words I really don't like is impactful. Excellent. I am delighted that I have friends here on. So, I was giving a talk a couple months ago and I said, I really don't like the word impactful. And there was a young man who was probably about 14, sitting up where I could see him and he just, he couldn't, he was just like, why? Like, what is your problem? And I said, there's no good reason. It's perfectly well formed. Something can be meaningful. It can be impactful. It means it has a lot of impact. I think it is probably stronger than saying something is significant. It has a slightly different meaning to say it is impactful. Why doesn't Anne Curzan like it? Because it is new within her lifetime. Right? So I'm not going to tell you exactly how old I am, but from this chart that starting, if we go back here to 1960, impactful, not a thing. If we come up here into the 21st century, impactful has taken off. It's very fashionable. There's nothing wrong with it. It is very helpful. I have opted out. So, and that's, we all have the right to opt out. You don't even have to give a reason. But I don't have good reason to cross it out in other people's writing because there's nothing wrong with it. And in fact, I can feel myself getting over it. I within the next year I will be using impactful. I can feel it. I will sometimes say things like that change is going to be very and I realize I've walked right up to it. And then I will just make a left turn and say significant or something like that. But I'm about to say impactful, it's going to happen. Um, so I have it too. I hear things. I think does the language really have to change that way? But I have a conversation with my grammando about how well formed that opinion is and whether it should come out of my head. So, I think I've gotten here in part because as a historian of the language, I study how the language changes over time. And I also study people's attitudes about that change. And what you see is that people have been concerned about change in language as long as there has been language. And when you look back at the things they were concerned about, they look ridiculous. So let me show you what I mean. Richard Grant White is one of my favorites. He was a grammarian in the 19th century who was very cranky about many, many things. And so I'm going to share just a couple of them. So here he has concerns about the verb leave. This verb is very commonly ill used by being left without an object. Thus Jones left this morning. I shall leave this evening. Left what? Shall leave what? Not the morning or the evening, but hometown or country. When this verb is used, the mention of the place referred to is absolutely necessary. We now think, what is your problem? You can just leave. You don't have to leave the Athenaeum. You can just leave. But this was relatively new within his lifetime, and he didn't like it. So he decided to write about it. Here we have Thomas De Quincy in 1851. The word sympathy at present so general by which instead of taking it in its proper sense as the act of reproducing in our minds the feelings of another, whether for hatred, indignation, love, pity or approbation. It is made a mere synonym of the word pity. And hence, instead of saying sympathy with another, many writers adopt the monstrous barbarism of sympathy for another. Okay. We now can have sympathy for people. It is very, very common. There are lots of concerns about prepositions. Because prepositions shift. Prepositions are highly idiomatic in English, for people who are learning English as a second or third language, prepositions are often extremely hard because we have a lot of them, and they are highly idiomatic. There are some other changes happening with prepositions that I hear about. One of them is about on accident. Okay. I'm getting some head nods. If you know young people, you are probably hearing some of the young people in your life say, oh, I did it on accident. Okay. I'm good. Thank you for the affirmation that you are hearing this. Um, I am a by accident, speaker. I would guess many in this room are by accident speakers. We are going to lose. Let's just be clear. If we look at the demographics, on average, by accident speakers are older than on accident speakers and they are going to outlive us. This is how language change happens. What I find interesting when I'm working with undergraduates is that many, many of them have never noticed this until I pointed it out. When I say, do you say by accident or on accident? They sit there and they think, and oh, I think it's say on accident. Some of them have both, but they've never noticed it. You notice it if you've noticed it because it's a change for you. It's going to happen. Why? Who knows? Prepositions just change. It could be because you have on purpose. So there you have a nice parallel. If it's on purpose, you could either decide to say by purpose and then we could have parallelism by by purpose and by accident, or you could have on purpose and on accident. So that is changing. Um, there is another change that several colleagues at Michigan have written to me about, which is about based on versus based off. Okay. And people are like, really? Either you're saying, yes, I hate that. Or seriously, someone's worried about that. The people who are worried about it are very worried about it and write to me about it. Based off is definitely happening. Historically, it's been based on. There are people who say it makes no sense to say based off, but I would argue you could make as much sense out of based off as you can on based on. So if you have a base, you build on the base. But if you also have a base, you could jump off the base like a springboard, as a jumping off point, and it is based off. Now, there are people like, okay, I'll I'll get on board with based off, but could we not say based off of? I don't like the double preposition. Fair enough. It's a little redundant, but that is also happening. So we get change in prepositions. Here is a change in pronunciation. So we have Samuel Rogers, 1855, the now fashionable pronunciation of several words is to me, at least, very offensive. Contemplate is bad enough, but balcony makes me sick. So this word was borrowed into English, the second they were both borrowed. Balcony came in from Italian. The stress was on the second syllable. Balcony. And English, as a Germanic language, tends to like stress on the first syllable. Put it brought it up to the first syllable, we get balcony, unremarkable to us now. But there are many shifts in pronunciation happening all around us. We could think about whether you have a T in often.
[24:16]So I would guess we probably have a mixed bag here. Historically, well, so often is interesting. If you go back several hundred years, it had a T, as did soften and hasten. They all had T's. And then that medial T got lost so that they none of them had T's. And then in the highly literate world in which we live, we are reintroducing the T in often. So you will now hear a lot of often particularly in more formal settings. Uh, when I ask undergraduates, a lot of them say, I have both, and when I'm bumping it up a little bit, I will say often because it feels more formal to have the T in it. Even though for several hundred years it didn't have the T. Um, I will give you another example from the book. This one is a really powerful pronunciation example of variation we have in the language. I'm going to start with the little what is shift eight on a keyboard that little star. Which I there are many ways to say it. The way it is spelled is asterk. That is not the way I say that word. I would like you to just say that word to yourself. Okay. I'm hearing some murmurs. I think I'm here. So I am an asterk speaker. My K and S have swapped. So I'm I say asterk unless I slow down. There are people who say asterik. There are people who say asteris. So we've got at least four. Um, some people will say I just say asterk. Like I don't have a I've I have shortened the middle syllable on that. I don't think, I could be wrong, but I don't think I have ever been judged for saying asterk. That someone has said Ann Curzan should not have her job because she says asterk. But people do say, you should not have that job if you say ask a question. And here's how we see that judgments about language are about much more than language. They're about speakers, they're about identity, they're about race and ethnicity, nationality. So what's interesting about ask and ask a question is that if you go back in the history of English, they're both old. And from what we can tell, the older form is probably asks. And that the swapping of the sounds was from ask to ask. And Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales uses ask a question, spelled A X E, and it was the high form. And then over time it came to be replaced by ask as a standard form, and the judgments that are loaded on to ask are severe and people will say, you shouldn't get that job if you say ask a question. So this is why what I work on is both delightful and funny and incredibly powerful and serious all at the same time. Because we do so much gatekeeping around language and around the diversity in language that is actually systematic and has a long history to it. So here is Richard Grant White again. I just had to share this one because it sets up an example that's happening around us. So he didn't like the verb donate. I need hardly say that this word is utterly abominable. It has been formed by some presuming and ignorant person from donation. Now, he's right about the etymology. So we had donation, and we back formed donate because we do that sometimes. So we have many, many examples. We had television, and then we needed a verb. We televise things on television.
[27:48]We had editor, and then we had to describe what editors do. So they edit things. It, uh, an interesting one, the word beggar, which you can if you, you know, B E G G A R, borrowed in from French. But if you hear it, it sounds like it has an R ending. So hundreds of years ago, we back formed beg from the French borrowing beggar. What do beggars do? They beg. What do lazy people do? They laze around. So here is a back formation that is going on around us that was brought to my attention by parents who came to me and said, what is going on with the verb verse? And then they said, Ann, make it stop. Which I was like, I cannot. And of course, my reaction was, that's totally fascinating. So is Venus Williams versing Serena Williams today. Again, if you hang out with young people, this is happening. So this afternoon, the University of Michigan is versing the University of Oregon in football. I'm concerned. Um, Oregon is very good. Um, what I think has happened here is that we've got a back formation from V E R S U S, coming in from the Latin. And if you think about kids who are hearing on the radio or television, Sunday, the Thunder versus the Heat, Serena Williams versus Venus Williams. It sounds like V E R S E S. It sounds like the thunder plays the heat. Serena plays Venus. And if you interpret it that way, as a third person singular S, then you've got a verb there, and the verb is verse. And verse means play against. And so now, verse means play against. And if you would like to stop it, you can't. It's happening. And and I don't see why we would, because actually, it's a great verb.
[29:48]Otherwise you have to say play against. You get to save two syllables here and say verse rather than play against. So, I would just get on board with this one. So let me share uh, three more. I'm going to do one historical one, and then two more recent peeves. So this one is hard for us to believe here in the 21st century, but in the 19th century, people were very concerned about the passive progressive. And if you've never had to think about the passive progressive, you do use the passive progressive all the time, for things that are being done progressively and passively. So, what are we talking about? We're talking about a construction like the bridge is being built. And here we have David Booth, for some time past, the bridge is being built, the tunnel is being excavated, and other expressions of a like kind have pained the eye and stunned the ear. This is all over 19th century grammar books. People hated the passive progressive when it came in. You're thinking, what what would you? How would you express that if you did not have the passive progressive? You would say, the house is building. Which makes no sense to us now. But I would guess that I have some Jane Austin readers in the room. And in the book, she says who, I share an example. Jane Austin did not have the passive progressive. When she was writing, this was not part of her grammar, and so it's in North Hanger Abbey and the sentence reads something like, the clock struck 10 as the trunks were carrying down. And what that means is that as the trunks were being carried down. We may not catch it because it's clear enough.
[31:36]But that's because she didn't have this construction. All right. I would guess some of you, like I did, grew up with Strung and White. Um, there are many people who still celebrate Strung and White. I am not very kind to Strung and White in says who? There is some helpful advice in there. There is also some not helpful advice in Strung and White. But just to show the the evolving nature of what people think is correct and what people are worried about. Here is 1979. Many of us in this room were alive in 1979. And we get this is about generic he. So he used to refer to any person. A teacher should learn his student's names. Generic he has become seemingly indispensable. It has no pejorative connotation. It is never incorrect. Now, I actually remember in elementary school and junior high school being told that I should use generic he, that it was correct and that it included me. Never felt like it included me, but that's what I was told. Now, obviously, the the advice on this one has changed significantly. But I wanted to share, 1979, this is what was seen as correct. And lastly, connected to the title of the book. Here is the New York Times style manual as late as 1999 with concerns about the adjective fun. So though the commercial may someday win respectability for fun as an adjective, a fun vacation, the gushing sound argues for keeping the word a noun. I do not understand what is gushing about fun as an adjective. But fun for most of its history in English was a noun, and in the 20th century it became an adjective, which is why you get funner and funnest. But through much of the 20th century, style guides were resisting fun as an adjective. Let alone funner and funnest. And you will notice that I put funnest in the title of the book, in part to have people pick it up and say, what kind of English professor would ever put funnest in the title of a book? And what I've loved is that some people when they've been introducing the book have said, a kinder, funnier usage guide and I'm like, nope, nope. I did put funner in the title of the book. And I'm happy to come back to funner and funnest, but it's it's the regular way that one syllable adjectives work. Once fun becomes an adjective, the comparative would be funner. Except that we don't like it. So then we say it can't be. All right. So let me at this point, there are many people, and you may be thinking this right now, who are thinking Ann Curzan has no standards. She is saying you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, and it doesn't matter. And I would like to be very clear, that's actually not what I'm saying. I am saying that we should be thinking about rhetorical effectiveness, about making choices with purpose, based on audience and context, and that there are many, many effective ways to use language depending on context. And so what I'm trying to do in the book is take different kinds of rules and show that some of these are helpful, and some of them are not. So the rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition, this has never been helpful. We have always been able to end sentences with prepositions in English. The fact that you cannot do it in Latin is irrelevant. Um, so that has never been helpful. Don't dangle or misplace your modifiers. In writing, this is super helpful, because it can be ambiguous if you have your modifier in the wrong place. In speech we don't notice. In writing, it can be confusing. We should be careful about that. Don't use the passive voice. This one needs a lot more nuance. Sometimes the passive voice is very, very helpful. It has been argued. The murder was committed. Right? If you put those in the active voice, they don't work particularly well. But sometimes it's really awkward. And the last one is a myth. Don't start a sentence with and or but. This has never been true. But it is now in the Microsoft Word grammar checker, which should have you asking a lot of questions about the Microsoft grammar checker, which I did, and I'm happy to talk about. So let me end here with giving you a few things to watch in the language. So, the full acceptance and writing of singular they, both as gender neutral and as non-binary. The ongoing demise of the inflected form whom. And I'm just going to show you a quick video from the office on this one. I mean, what I really want, honestly, Michael, is for you to know what, so that you can communicate it to the people here, to your clients, to whomever. Okay. What? It's whoever, not whomever. No, whomever is never actually right. No, sometimes it's right. Michael is right. It's a made-up word used to trick students. No. Actually, whomever is the formal version of the word. Obviously, it's a real word, but I don't know when to use it correctly. Do you really know which one is correct? I don't know. It's whom when it's the object of the sentence and who when it is the subject. That sounds right. Well, it sounds right, but is it? How did it use it as an object? As an object. Ryan used me as an object. Is he right about the How did he use it again? It was Ryan wanted Michael, the subject, to uh explain the computer system, the object. Thank you. To whomever, meaning us, the indirect object. Which is the, the correct usage of the word. No one, uh, asked you anything ever. So, whomever's name is Toby, why don't you take a letter opener and stick it in your Doesn't matter. And I don't even care. So, what I love about this is people are saying, it's it's not a word, it's never a word, it's the formal version. Whom has been trying to die for several hundred years, and we could just let it die. The decline of must in the sense of necessity. Very few people are noticing this, but if you have errands to run this afternoon, I would guess most of you would say, I have to run errands. Not, I must run errands. I must. Feels very strong at this point, because must is declining and we're getting these new auxiliaries, have to, want to, gonna, sposta. And if we didn't have such standardized spelling, that is how they would be spelled. The increasing use of less instead of fewer, I'm very sorry, Mom. It's just happening. Um, ongoing apostrophe instability. And then, and because there are people who seem to think that there was a moment in the history of English where everyone agreed about how to use an apostrophe. And I'm here to say there has never been that moment in the history of English when we all agreed about how to use an apostrophe. And the last one is this repurposing of punctuation to meet the demands of texting. So here you have written language moving very, very fast, without tone, without facial expression. And so texting, young people have created conventions, and they're using punctuation to do the work. So if I show this to a room of undergrads, they will say, these three texts are completely different. Completely. The one on the left over here, that is neutral. The okay with a period, that is serious, potentially angry. Okay, that is skeptical. I'm waiting for more information. They have repurposed punctuation to do the work. So the four key messages from the book, all living languages change because humans. Diversity in language is part of the diversity of us, and it should be celebrated as part of the diversity of us. Correctness in language, as I hope I've shown you with some of these examples, is not a stable concept. And we can care deeply about language and be kind to each other. And what I hope we can be is more curious and seeking more information. And I'll leave you with this analogy from the book, which is I hope that we can become language birders. That birders or bird watchers, when they see a new bird, they're curious. How does it fly? How does it sing? Where does it live? What's going on with it? They don't say kill it. And yet, when we hear something new in language, we're often like, kill that thing. As opposed to what's going on over there. I could be curious about it. And so I'm hoping to spark that kind of curiosity because our language is ever changing and it's actually fascinating. So now I would love to hear your questions and concerns. Hi, thanks so much for your great talk. I come from a family where irregardless was literally a fight in the household, and my camp old letters home from camp came back edited with spelling corrections. So, I have a sort of more philosophical question. There are languages that are more or less poetic. English is not fundamentally a very poetic language. I'm wondering if you've thought about if your language is more poetic, if that has a psychological or cultural impact. Can you help me understand what you mean by poetic? Um, Arabic, for example, is much more the words, the use of poetry embedded in speech. The flowing use of descriptions and understanding. Okay. So it's an it's an interesting question. It's a much it's a it's as you note, it's a huge question. Um, I want to be careful about a word like poetic because of course my first reaction is, of course, there's been phenomenal poetry written in many, many varieties of English. And one of the things that humans seem to do with language, we we use metaphor. Um, different languages will do that differently, but English actually employs metaphor all the time. What George Lakoff has called conceptual metaphors. So, for example, we talk about understanding as seeing, and then your ideas are clear or opaque to me. When we say, I see what you mean. I don't see what you mean. Good is up and bad is down, right? And then we structure a whole way of thinking about language that way. Um, the question of the relationship of language and thought is a huge one. Um, so I recognize this is probably an insufficient answer to your question. But one of the things that I worry about and that all linguists are worrying about is that we are losing languages every week, every year. Um, and that we're losing a lot of cultural knowledge and culture as we lose those languages because there is a way in which people are capturing the world, speaking about the world, making particular distinctions within a language about the world, and when we lose those, we lose the art, we lose the poetry, but we also just lose the categories and the way of speaking about the world, and that's a huge loss for us. Thank you so much for your talk. Uh, English major as well, followed by business school. Great writer. My pet peeve is when people say, I've been wanting, I've been wanting to go there. I've been wanting to travel there, and it sounds awful to me. Why not say, I'd like to go there. This been wanting sounds incorrect, and I've never seen an explanation for the usage. You are the first person who has ever brought this up to me. Is there anyone else here who is been noticing this? I mean, this is one of the things I love about this talk and and giving these talks is that I get to hear new things. So I do not have a good answer for you, but I will get one. Um, and it will probably show up on the radio show, that's what they say. So I've been wanting. So you don't like the perfect tense there of why have you put it in the perfect tense there of I mean, people are saying, I've been I've been wanting this for a while, right? Because the perfect starts in the past and comes up to the present. I mean, I think that's what people are trying to express. I'm totally working this out in my head right now. Um, I'd like to suggest only right now. I've been wanting to suggest a long time desire. It started in the past and it's continuing to the present. Now, what I'm going to look at because I don't know, is is that construction increasing right now? Because that might be why you're noticing it, is that it is fashionable at the moment. So that's what I want to find out is what's going on with that. Thank you very much for your talk. Um, could you please comment on usage fads like you know and I mean. Uh, the usage of you know and I mean. Um, and um. These are what linguists would call discourse markers. They actually do work in conversation. There's a whole sub field of where people study these, it's called pragmatics. Something like, you know, is a way to bring in your audience. You're trying to invite people in. I mean is a way to diminish your own authority, which sounds like a bad thing but sometimes it's not. Sometimes you want to soften your own opinion. I mean, I think it's blah, blah, blah, which opens up some space for somebody to disagree with you, as opposed to I think blah, blah, blah. I mean, I think um, keeps the floor. It says I'm about to say something, do not talk right now. I still have the floor. Like is of course a very common discourse marker. So they do a lot of work. Where they start to have trouble doing their work is when we overuse them. We don't notice them when they are not common. We're all, we all use them. But if someone has a discourse marker that they use a lot, you know, or I mean, or like, then it starts to become prominent because it's overused. So I think we often think discourse markers are distracting. They're not distracting when they're being used at a more minimal level. They are distracting when and we all have them. When I teach, I use right. It's the way I invite students in, but I use it a lot. That I'll say something right right right. And then of course, a student pointed it out to me when we were doing discourse markers. I was teaching, they said, you know what your discourse marker is, Professor Curzan. I was like, oh, please tell me. Hi, I just wanted to say thank you for um, the talk and I want to say specifically, I really appreciate the nods that you've given about how language can disguise judgment. Something that has been a huge preoccupation for me for the last few years is the usage of words like good, bad, worse, better, best. Um, words that I find really difficult to process because I feel they're so frequently used euphemistically. Um, I'm curious to know if you have any information or thoughts on either the history of the usage of these words or just any thoughts generally how you handle these words that both say so much and maybe nothing at the same time. So if I'm hearing you right, the concerns about those being used almost hyperbolically. Okay. Where good, bad, best are being used for things that might not be the best. Is that? Okay. Um, there actually, some of you may have seen it. John McWhorter had a really interesting column about this within the last couple of weeks. About his argument is that humans we often want to be emphatic or over the top or extravagant. And so we will speak in hyperbolic ways. And what happens is that then a word over time will lose its strength. And the place where we see this most dramatically in English is intensifiers. So, if you look at intensifiers, truly used to mean, it is true. It was the adverb of it is true, and then it just became an intensifier. It's truly great. Really, meant real. Very is also related to truth. And all of those as they became intensifiers, then they lose their strength over time. Um, and so, and then so then we have to make new ones like super or Uber or wicked in slang, to do that kind of extravagant work. So people will lament this as a kind of weakening, but as a linguist, I just see it as change over time. That there are words that will get stronger in intensity and there are words that will get weaker. Thank you. I actually I I do see the usage there as like an intensifier. I think I was more specific about your comment earlier about like, oh, someone who that's not good. That's a good person wouldn't do that. Or the way that judgment is loaded into the language, and the impact of that. Okay, thank you for clarifying. So that is something that this is my mission, as a linguist trying to do this work is that this is how I was educated. Is that there is a right way to use the English language and then there are many wrong ways to use the English language, and the right way is the formal edited standard way. And then everything else is irregular or broken or slangy, or whatever it is. And it's simply linguistically not true. There are formal ways and informal ways to use the language. There are standardized ways and non-standard ways. And they are all effective in different contexts. So the idea that the formal standard way is the best way to use English, it's just not true. We know that. It is actually enormously ineffective in many contexts. It will make you sound overeducated, snobby, pretentious. Whatever it is, it will not actually be an effective way to use the language. And linguistically, this, you know, I'm trying to get truth about the fact that all varieties are systematic. They're all rule governed. When people try to say to me, the double negative is illogical and broken. I'm like, the double negative is completely logical in language. I know that in math, you multiply two negatives, you get a positive, but I don't care. Math is not language, and if you add two negatives in math, you get a bigger negative. So, um, and if you look historically, most varieties of English had double negative, and then the standardized variety moved to single negation, and many world varieties still use double negation. But the judgments on it are really strong. So you're getting at the reason I wrote this book, is that it is so that we can have more informed conversations about language. And if we do that, we actually can A, have more fun because language is fascinating and we can learn about it and the diversity of it and how it changes, and we can be kinder to each other. And embrace all of that diversity and change. If you come across out there as a phrase, I noticed it by in a presentation by a CEO in investment presentation recently, where he used it at least 50 times in 30 minutes. It's like a verbal tick. Out there. Can you meaning? Uh, almost no meaning to it. And this was in a business context. Yeah, he just threw it in, yeah. This is what's happening out there. Ah, huh. Again, I'm going to look at that one too in terms of. So business jargon tends to get a lot of criticism. And I've done a couple of podcasts about this. It is, there's a lot of new jargon that comes through the business world, I think because people want new, new language. Uh, um, there's a premium on that in a lot of business contexts. I think a lot of people like to harsh on business if they're worried that it has an outsized influence on us generally in the culture. Um, but what's also fascinating about business jargon, so I'm going to have to look it out there, but some things that used to be seen as jargonny, so the verb finalize in the 1960s was seen as very jargonny. Now, nobody cares about it. Now, incentivize feels jargonny or problematic. I Z E verbs when they come in, people don't like them. So Ben Franklin hated the verb colonize. And I will end with an example of me going grammando on a bit of business slang. So the Dean, the former Dean of the Business School at Michigan, used to use the verb double click all the time. 50 times in a presentation, because for him, it was the way he transitioned between slides. So there would be three bullet points and he would say, let's double click on that first one. And then it would transition to the next slide. And I was so cranky about it. I just sat there going, this is ridiculous. This business school jargon, double click, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I usually have better control of my inner grammando, but it was freaking out. And usually I keep my inner grammando quiet in my head, but for whatever reason that night, over dinner, I decided to share with my partner how much I hated the verb double click. And by the time I got done, he just looks at me and he says, I actually think it's quite clever. And of course, he's right. It's kind of poetic. As a way for all of us to remember double clicking on icons is the way you got more information, more access. I have again, I've opted out. But my inner grammando has calmed down about this particular thing. Thank you all for being here and spending part of a Saturday afternoon with me. For more information on Anne Curzan, including the link to her book, Says Who, a kinder, funner usage guide for everyone who cares about words, head to the show notes or Chicagohumanities.org. Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced and hosted by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with help from the staff at Chicago Humanities who are producing the live events and making sure they sound fantastic. Thanks for joining us for a wonderful year in fascinating speakers and sparkling audio. The best way to support our programming is to leave a rating and a review, hit subscribe to be notified about new episodes, and check out our backlog for a gem you might have missed. And we want to know what you think. You can shape the future of the podcast by taking the short listener survey in the show notes. It helps us out a lot. The podcast is taking a short break, but we'll be back in 2025 with some really great new programs and some wonderful stuff from our 30 plus year archive. Hey, thanks for listening. And as always, stay human.
