Anne Curzan
Anne 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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Your challenge this week is to try and avoid using the construction "try and." Why, you ask? Because we get a lot of questions from listeners about this...
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Sometimes a not-so-great experience can be made just a bit better if you have an excellent slang phrase to describe it. We think "take the L" falls...
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Apparently, "in and of itself” is the source of some concern about redundancy. This phrase wasn’t actually on our radar until a listener brought it up...
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When someone asks you to “take a listen,” it’s usually meant as a friendly invitation. But not everyone wants to take a listen. Several listeners have...
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Consonant sounds like "sh" and "th" and "ch" have a reasonably secure place in our language. You’ll find them at the beginning, middle and end of many...
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Pronouns are on the front burner of language change at the moment. As such, we get a lot of questions about them. For example, a listener recently asked...
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The word “pique” recently piqued the interest of one of our listeners. Colin Williams wrote to us after seeing the phrase, "As the president's pique...
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The Rio Grande is certainly a grand river. But not everyone thinks it's grand enough to be called "river" twice, as in the Rio Grande River. In case you...
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Grammarians sometimes worry about whether you can count the things to which a noun refers. And no, we're not talking about "less" and "fewer."
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Have you ever heard of the "needs washed" construction? That's when the verb "need" is followed by a past participle like "washed" or "fixed" without ...