980. This week, I talk with with Anne Curzan about the fascinating world of language evolution, her new book, "Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Language," and why linguists should take marketing tips from Apple and why Ben Franklin thought the word "colonize" was bad.
980. This week, I talk with with Anne Curzan about the fascinating world of language evolution, her new book, "Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Language," and why linguists should take marketing tips from Apple and why Ben Franklin thought the word "colonize" was bad.
| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/curzan/transcript
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References for the Aging segment
van Boxtel, W, Lawyer, L. Sentence comprehension in ageing and Alzheimer's disease. Lang Linguist Compass. 2021;e12430.
Payne, B. R., Gao, X., Noh, S. R., Anderson, C. J., & Stine-Morrow, E. A. (2012). The effects of print exposure on sentence processing and memory in older adults: Evidence for efficiency and reserve. Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, 19(1–2), 122–149.
Hey, it's Mignon. Today's show is the second in a series of interviews called Grammar Girl Conversations that I'm doing with my favorite people — authors, dictionary editors, medievalists, and more. Today, linguist Anne Curzan will tell us why Benjamin Franklin didn't like the word "colonize," how — as a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel — she decided whether to accept that "funner" and "funnest" should be acceptable (or not), and how having a laser focus on language hilariously accidentally led to asking her students an inappropriate question. Enjoy the show.
Mignon Fogarty:
Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, and I'm so excited because today I have Anne Curzan as a guest. Anne is a historian of the English language, an English professor at the University of Michigan, a language radio show host, a frequent public speaker on Grammar Peeves, a copy editor and most important for us today, the author of "Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Language." Thanks so much for being here, Anne.
Anne Curzan:
I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yes, you're welcome. And as I was reading the subtitle of your book, it suddenly hit me that we absolutely have to talk about the word "funner" first, because it's in the title of your book.
Anne Curzan:
And I'm going to start by asking how you feel about the word "funner."
Mignon Fogarty:
Oh, interesting. Well, we've talked about “fun,” “funner,” and “funnest” before on the show. I call it the "fun continuum." But you say in your book that for some reason, “funnest” feels more acceptable than “funner,” and I agree.
Anne Curzan:
I have learned that from undergraduates over the years — that their negative response is less strong to “funnest” than it is to “funner.” Let's talk about what's happening here in general. The word "fun" was a noun for much of its life. So if someone said, “That party was fun,” it was like saying, “That party was chaos.” One can also imagine that kids, hearing adults say, “That party was fun,” could easily interpret fun as an adjective in that spot. “That party was boring, that party was great, that party was fun.” And interpret it as an adjective they did.
Interestingly, for much of the 20th century, it was controversial whether "fun" should even be allowed to be an adjective. I think for most of us now, that seems uncontroversial to be able to say, “That party was very fun,” which shows it's an adjective.
Now what kids do once it's an adjective is try to make it behave like other one-syllable adjectives. "Tall," "taller," "tallest." "Wide," "wider," "widest." "Fun" — we can see where this is going — "funner," "funnest." And they'll do that until they get corrected by some adult authority figure who says, "Oh, no, no, no. ‘It's more fun, most fun’." At which point that gets stored as an exception.
But particularly in advertising, you're seeing “funnest.” There was an iPod commercial, “the funnest iPod ever.” And I think that's partly how "funnest" is sneaking in. And my guess is that “funnest” will sneak in first, and “funner” will come in on its coat tails. And it's interesting to me. People will say, "Oh, I just hate the way that funner sounds." To which I ask, "How do you feel about the word 'runner'?" And they're like, "Oh, runner's fine." And I say, "Well, they rhyme, of course. We've just been trained to feel like there's something bad about 'funner' or that it sounds wrong."
Now, why did I put it in the title? I think both to be playful and to suggest that the book is a little bit irreverent. And I know that if I put a peeve in the title, there's a good chance that some folks will probably pick it up to see what's going on here, that I have a usage guide that has “funner” in the title.
Mignon Fogarty:
So you're using the same marketing trick that Apple used with “the funnest iPod ever.”
Anne Curzan:
Exactly.
Mignon Fogarty:
Well, I think it's probably good practice to take marketing tips from Apple. They've done pretty well.
So one of the things that intrigues me about your background is that you were on the American Heritage Dictionary usage panel. And I've been kind of, not obsessed, but I'm intrigued by the usage panel. I think it's such an interesting panel.
And we had Steve Kleinedler on a few months ago, and he was the person at the dictionary who managed the panel. And you were on it. I would love to hear what it was like from your perspective as someone who was answering all those usage questions.
Anne Curzan:
It was such an interesting experience to be on that panel. I'm glad I was able to do that. I was asked to join in 2005, and I was one of about 12 linguists on the panel. And the panel's over 200. I recognized when I agreed to serve on it that I was serving a particular role as someone with training as a linguist who might come at these questions slightly differently.
It started as a paper survey, but I'll talk about it once it went online. We would receive this link to a set of questions, 30 or 40 questions. And these would be pronunciations and word meanings, grammatical issues. And you would get a set of sentences. And then there were four choices: completely unacceptable, somewhat unacceptable, somewhat acceptable, completely acceptable. Sometimes students will ask me, "Well, acceptable where?" I'd say that's a really fair question.
We didn't get a lot of guidance other than more formal settings, but that could be spoken, that could be written. And of course, you had to answer the question to get to the next page in the online survey. So you couldn't just say, "Oh, I don't want to answer this question." You had to answer it in order to keep going on the survey.
Mignon Fogarty:
Oh, that's so interesting. Because on paper, you could have just skipped it.
Anne Curzan:
So you had to keep going. You could put in comments, and sometimes I would put in comments.
I often thought about my fellow panelists as I would fill it out and think, "How are they thinking about this decision?" And when I would talk with Steve Kleinidler or others at American Heritage, they would say, "We have this sense that some people just fill it out over coffee, however they're feeling about things, and some people look at data."
And I was one of the data people. I also have the good fortune of teaching at the University of Michigan. So I could go to undergraduates in my courses and say, "Okay, how does this sound to you? Is this a pronunciation that's familiar to you?" I would also use these big online databases. So when the question was, for example, "Is it acceptable to say or write ‘equally as important’?" Because in theory, you don't need the "equally" there. I would go look in the database, and of course, you can find "equally" as important all over edited prose. And so I would say, it's acceptable. You can find it. It's already there.
Mignon Fogarty:
That's fascinating. That was kind of what I was wondering, because you are both a linguist and you've done copy editing. And I think in a lot of ways, the answer of whether something's acceptable is really different depending on which context you're working in at the time. If I'm copy editing, I'm flagging something for a writer to consider. “Do you want to put this in? Because maybe it'll be perceived as an error.”
But as a linguist, as sort of a wordy, which we'll get to in a sec, I feel like language change is fascinating, and I might be more inclined to say something is acceptable if I were thinking sort of on the...I'm not a linguist, but on the linguist side sort of of my brain that's developed over the years. But you went to data and your students and...
Anne Curzan:
I did. And that's part of how I thought about my role on the usage panel, which is to think about the fact that I could influence the gatekeepers. As you say, there's this sense of you might get judged for this in writing. And one of the places people will go is usage guides or the usage notes in an American Heritage Dictionary to see, "Is there something wrong with this? Should I correct it?" Including copy editors. And the only way we're going to change that is if people on the usage panel are indicating more acceptance. And so I used my descriptive training to say, "We could open the gates wider." That you could have more variation in the language. You could have both "as important" and "equally as important." It's fine to let in “finalize” as a verb, as well as “implement,” and even “funner” and “funnest,” because that was on the usage panel survey.
And I thought you're never going to see changes in the gatekeeping unless those of us who are in these positions signal that the gates could be open wider, and we would be fine.
Mignon Fogarty:
Absolutely. Yeah, and it's a huge responsibility to be on the panel that's making those. Because even though, as Steve said, it's only a couple hundred people, and it's a point in time. But when you look at that number, when you see 80% of people said this was fully acceptable, or 20%, I don't know, there's something about the way our brains process numbers. You can't help but feel it sort of set in stone and forget about the fact that it's only a relatively small number of people.
Anne Curzan:
I think that's such an important point. And I think people also forget to ask, "Wait a minute. Who is this usage panel? Do I need to believe this usage panel?" That they see 70% of the usage panel rejects this sentence, and they nod and say, "Oh, yes. Then it's clearly wrong.”
If you look in the preface to the dictionary, you will see, if you're in a print dictionary, you will see a note that says, "The usage panel should not be taken as the final authority on language. It might be a useful reference point." And that's what I think it can be, It's one reference point for knowing how a relatively conservative group of over 200 people feel about usage. And then you can use that as you're making decisions as a speaker and writer.
Mignon Fogarty:
Right. And I mean, that's the title of your book, "Says Who?"
Anne Curzan:
Exactly.
Mignon Fogarty:
On all these things, says who? Well, I have another question for you that's a little philosophical before we get into the fascinating tidbits from your book. Because you did a TED Talk about what is a word, a very popular TED Talk, and my husband and I debate this over dinner. We disagree about what is a word. And so he's not here to defend himself, so I'm just going to say he's wrong. But he insists that, you know, one of the things he holds to is that if a word hasn't been used for a couple hundred years, we shouldn't call it a word anymore. And because nobody uses it, nobody knows what it means, how can you call it a word if you see it and it looks like gibberish to you? So I'd love to get into the philosophical idea of what makes something a word.
Anne Curzan:
I'm fascinated by this question as well. And I get it on a regular basis, given what I do, where someone will pick a word that is relatively new to them and say, "But Anne, is that a real word?"
And so I've thought a lot about “What do people mean by that question?” And a lot of times, I think what they mean is, “Could I find that in a standard dictionary?” Now, what they'll say is, “Could I find it in the dictionary?” And I have also thought a lot about that phrase, “the dictionary,” because of course, there are lots and lots of dictionaries and they have different approaches and different philosophies. They were published at different dates. They're British, they're American, they're from other countries. So lots of stuff packed into that phrase, “the dictionary.”
A word is a real word if it has a shared meaning within a community. If I can use the word to other people in my community, whether that's a little specialized community or a broader community and other people know what I mean, then that string of sounds is functioning as a word.
I love the question of whether archaic words are still words. I would make the argument that they are because they have a preserved life in literature or in documents. There are of course, many old words that have just died because they weren't in the written record, and therefore we don't ever, we don't now know that they existed. So they're no longer a word because if you uttered them, you would have no way to know what that meant.
The words that are preserved in writing, I would say are still real words because they're meaningful to people who read that literature, who study that literature.
They have a context in which they live, but this is where dictionary editors are doing that hard work of labeling that this word is a real word, but it's obsolete or it's archaic to suggest that it might still be useful to have it in a dictionary because someone might need to find it, but it's not functioning like the words that we use every day.
Mignon Fogarty:
Thank you. Well, I think this is a good time to take a quick break for our sponsors and when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the fascinating tidbits from Anne's book, "Says Who?"
Mignon Fogarty:
And we're back with Anne Curzan, author of "Says Who?"
And the book is just filled with interesting anecdotes, things that I didn't know about language, even though I've been doing this for many, many years. So one anecdote that just blew my mind is that people lamented the loss of the double negative in English. So Anne, please tell us more about that.
Anne Curzan:
I love this quote because it shakes people up in the way they think about judgments about what is correct and incorrect English. And one of my points in the book is that these judgments change over time. The concept of good English or correct English or standard English is not stable.
If you look at the history of English, double negation or multiple negation was widespread in English. Old English, you find double and multiple negation. Chaucer's era, it's still there, into the Renaissance.
And then it so happens that the variety of English that gets standardized and becomes the standard variety in Britain moves to single negation. But many varieties of English retain double negation and have double negation to this day. It is now often seen as illogical or wrong, but it is important to remember that, of course, all varieties had it. And in the late 19th century, there is this quote of someone, Fitz Edward Hall, who is quoting the London review and talking about how terrible it is that we've lost double negation. And he looks back to the King James Bible, 1611, and says, "That is the high point."
And I always love it. People look back to some moment, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the King James Bible, Chaucer, that was when English was really good, and it has all been downhill since then. So he says, "1611 was the high point." And then it goes on, "The double negative has been abandoned to the great injury of strength of expression."
Mignon Fogarty:
I'm sure many people in the audience are just saying, "What? How can that be?"
Anne Curzan:
I know. But of course, double negation can be a wonderful construction. It is a part of many people's grammar. And I love the fact that some people will try to make the argument that it is illogical because in math, two negatives cancel each other out, which I find to be a fascinating argument for a couple of reasons. One is that language is not math. Second, even if we were to do math, if you multiply two negatives in math, it is true that you get a positive. But if you add two negatives, you get a bigger negative.
Mignon Fogarty:
As not a math person, I probably never would have thought of that.
Anne Curzan:
So it's these kinds of things of trying to help people rethink some of the beliefs that we have inherited, and I inherited them as well. My mother was a very prescriptive person. She had been trained in her life in terms of proper or correct grammar. She edited all my papers in high school. She was a copy editor herself. And we went to the grocery store, and she'd point out the sign that said "10 items or less" and make sure that her daughters knew that that sign was grammatically incorrect. So I learned all of this as I was growing up.
And it wasn't until I started studying linguistics in college that I realized there was another way to think about these issues. And I started to learn about how the English language has changed over time and how attitudes about what's right and wrong have also changed over time.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah, I love using examples of words that people objected to in the past because words that seem so normal to us. And you had some examples that I had not heard before. So you want to go through some of those that are from your book?
Anne Curzan:
Oh, I'd be delighted because I also find these hilarious and really useful because I think they can help us get some perspective on whatever peeve is bothering us at this moment.
Richard Grant White, who was a grammarian in the late 19th century, is one of my favorites, and he did not like the verb "donate." He felt that this was utterly abominable. And he thought it was abominable because it had been backformed from the noun "donation," which is of course true. You had “donation” first and then “donate” was created, backformed out of “donation.” But now we look at his complaint, and we think, "’Donate’ is abominable? Really?"
Mignon Fogarty:
They use such strong language in their …
Anne Curzan:
Very strong language. And "abominable" actually is a word that comes up quite often. Ben Franklin gave up the verb "colonize" as "bad." And over time, I have to say I-Z-E words have not fared well. "Colonize," "finalize" was seen as jargon in the 1960s. Now people don't like "incentivize." Those poor I-Z-E verbs really struggle.
Ben Franklin also did not like new verbs such as "notice" or "advocate," which had been created from the nouns, and they were relatively new in his era. And then another favorite from Richard Grant White, this is actually a new use of the verb "leave." And here he says, "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 home, town, or country. When this verb is used, the mention of the place referred to is absolutely necessary."
Mignon Fogarty:
It would never occur to me that anyone would ever object to that. It seems hilarious today.
And I always imagine people 200 years from now looking at how we object to, I don't know, “adulting” or “conversate” or something like that and saying, "How ridiculous those people were in the 2020s."
Anne Curzan:
Exactly. And when I think about there you have Richard Grant White worried about "leave," which had always been used with an object, being used without an object. And just recently someone complained to me about how jargony it is to say, to "progress a project" or to "grow a business.” And I thought, "You're going to lose."
Mignon Fogarty:
Right. Yeah. One I heard about recently … this surprised me … was to “calendar” something, to put it on the calendar. And yeah, people say it because it's useful.
Anne Curzan:
Yeah. Absolutely. I can use that intransitively as well, that we're going to...It's time for us to calendar.
Mignon Fogarty:
Oh, I have not heard that.
Anne Curzan:
Which is like we need to coordinate our calendar so my partner and I will calendar.
Mignon Fogarty:
Here's the thing. I hate that, but I also recognize that language changes, and if it's useful to people, it will probably win.
Anne Curzan:
Well, and I think that that gets to, that even you and I have a little inner grammando in our head that is going to hear some of these things and not be happy about it.
Mignon Fogarty:
Right. I think it's important to acknowledge that there are things that you don't like, but that doesn't make them wrong or not useful or not part of the way language is going. It can be both.
You don't have to use it yourself. And then again, if you're copy editing, it's maybe something that you should flag for the writer to make their own decision. And there I am using the singular "they," which we all do all the time and is fine.
Anne Curzan:
So that's right. And I love the way you said that right there of “flag this so the writer can make their own decision.” And that's something that I'm trying to reinforce in this book, which is that the more information we have about how language works, about how different usage guides have handled an issue, we can make more informed choices as speakers and as writers, not saying this is right and this is wrong, but here are attitudes about this. Now you can decide how you want to navigate your way through this.
I also love the way you talked about your inner grammando of you can feel it, and then you decide what am I going to do with this feeling that I have? I just caught myself recently.
A colleague of mine at the business school uses the verb “double click” as his transition between slides. So if there are, for example, three things in a list, he will say, "Okay, and then let's double click on the first one." And that will be the transition to the next slide where we're going to dive into or dig into whatever was on the first bullet point.
And I sat there going, "This is such business school jargon. I can't believe that he's using double click this way." And I don't often let my inner grammando out of my head. Usually we just have conversations in my head. But I came home and I was telling my partner, "I can't believe the way ‘double click’ is being used." And he said, "I actually think it's quite clever." And my inner grammando just stopped talking right there because of course it is actually rather delightful.
Mignon Fogarty:
You just took a deep breath, looked at it with a new perspective. Well, I'm really, I'm envious of you in your position as a professor. It's been seven years since I've worked with students. And it's such a wonderful opportunity to sort of be on top of what's changing with language. And you mentioned that “amongst,” your students are using “amongst” more often. And I had just started noticing that, but I'm still hearing it from people. Do you feel like it's increasing even more? And if so, why? It sounds so formal or British, why are students doing this?
Anne Curzan:
I can't tell yet if it's on the increase or if it's just there as a variant. It could be a couple of things. One is as writers, particularly I teach at a university, students are trying on and experimenting with more formal kinds of writing because that's what they're being asked to do. So they're experimenting with different kinds of conjunctive adverbs and things that are much more characteristic of formal writing than they are of speech. “Moreover,” “nevertheless,” these are not words that we tend to use in our everyday conversations.
And I think that “amongst” feels more formal to students. And so it may find its way into more formal writing as the way that “however” is a more formal way of saying “but,” “amongst” is a more formal way of saying “among.”
There also may be something playful happening here. And this is something I'd want to watch. As you may know, there has been some playfulness around “whomst.”
Mignon Fogarty:
Yes, “whomst.”
Anne Curzan:
And so that S-T at the end has a kind of slangy irreverence to it, and I can't tell if that is happening or might happen with “amongst.”
Mignon Fogarty:
That's great. I've had “whomst” on my list of possible topics for about a year. That’s great. I have to figure out what's going on there. And I've seen “whomst’ve” of like whomst apostrophe VE.
Anne Curzan:
And “whomst ever.”
Mignon Fogarty:
Oh, I haven't seen that yet. Oh my gosh. Well, you know, thinking about change, you know, you do a radio program. Do you hear… has there been a change in the types of questions you get in the last, say, five years or so? Are there any trends that you have your finger on that we should know about?
Anne Curzan:
I don't…One of the things I love about the radio show is that people write in with words that I have not thought a lot about. Now, occasionally this could be because there's a change happening in the language. For example, recently I started to get questions about “a training” or “trainings.” Now this had not really been on my radar because I will say I go to trainings all the time, and I hadn't thought about it, but it is being seen as jargony. It is also being seen as new.
Of course, I went to the Oxford English Dictionary, and it turns out that “training” as a singular is hundreds of years old. Looks like it probably goes back to military trainings, and you could have a military training, but pretty quickly it generalized to any kind of training. That said, if you go to Google Books to the Ngram Viewer and you look at trends, you see that it has radically increased. That singular use of "training" has dramatically increased over the last 20 years. And that's why people are noticing it is that suddenly it's in the water, it's in the air, we're seeing it written down, we're hearing it, and people are suddenly saying, even though it's been around for hundreds of years, "Oh, I don't like that. It must be new and it must be wrong."
Mignon Fogarty:
It's so funny. I feel like I've heard that my whole life. But yeah, when things increase, more people notice or it can become maybe a feeling of being overused. So that could be too.
Anne Curzan:
I think that's right. And people's reaction to overuse sometimes is it's being overused, but sometimes it is, "This is wrong." It's that little inner grammando that notices a new thing and has this negative reaction. And then sometimes that comes out of our mouth as a correction, as opposed to, "I'm having some kind of personal reaction to this term," which I probably will get over.
For a long time I have not liked the adjective “impactful.” I have no good reason for this. It's perfectly well-formed, "meaningful," "hopeful," "impactful." And I can feel myself close to using it. I start sentences saying, "This change is going to be very..."
And I realize I'm headed straight for it.
And then I have to take a right or a left turn and say, "It's very significant."
But what I want to say is "impactful," and it's probably six more months and I'll get over it.
Mignon Fogarty:
Yeah. Well, the other section that I really loved in the book, the book "Says Who?" was the section on irregular verbs, because I've talked about “sneaked” and “snuck” many times in the past. But you had some examples that I just hadn't thought of before. And the thing that's interesting about "snuck" is that the verb is going from regular to irregular, which isn't the typical way you think of verbs changing, but it's actually not the only one. So if you could talk about that and some of those examples to finish up today, that would be fantastic.
Anne Curzan:
Of course. And I think “snuck” is a great example because it's happening all around us. And it's right now quite distinctively American English, that British speakers often will see "snuck" as quite an American English feature.
As a historian of the language, people will sometimes ask me, "Is English getting more regular over time?" And my answer is, "Yes, except where it's not." And it's the fun perspective of being someone who studies the whole history of the English language. We have verbs that used to be irregular that become regular over time. So “help” the past tense was “holp,” and now it's “helped.” So it picks up that "-ed" and becomes a regular verb.
But the verb “dig,” the past tense used to be “digged.” And in fact, you can find “digged” in the King James Bible, but now the past tense is “dug.” And the verb “dive,” you actually can find two past tenses right now. For many speakers, the past tense is “dove.” But for some speakers, the past tense is “dived.” And “dived” is actually the older form. “Dove” is the newer form.
There we can probably guess at the analogy "drive," "drove," "dive," "dove." But these things happen in the language. And I think a verb to watch is “drag.”
And I will tell a story on myself, which is one of the funniest stories of my teaching career, which is, it happened on the first day of class. I was talking with students about “sneak” and “snuck,” because I also think it's a great example. And the graduate student assistant in the class said, "You know, the other day I heard someone use ‘drug’ as the past tense of ‘drag,’ at which point I turned to this entire class of undergraduates. And I say, 'So how many of you are drug users?'"
And as soon as it comes out of my mouth, I say, "Oh, no, no, no. Don't tell me. Don't tell me. I don't want to know."
Mignon Fogarty:
I laughed out loud when I read that in the book. I actually literally laughed out loud.
Anne Curzan:
Very nice use of literally.
Mignon Fogarty:
Thank you. For emphasis, but also accurate.
Well, what fun it must be to take your classes at the University of Michigan, and I'm sure it's as much fun as reading your book, "Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words." Thank you so much. Where can people find you if they want to follow you online or learn more about you?
Anne Curzan:
Sure. Well, the podcast that you mentioned is "That's What They Say." They can find that anywhere where they find their podcasts, and the new book they can find at any bookstore or online retailer. And you can follow me on Instagram or my website, Annecurzan.com.
Mignon Fogarty:
Are you Anne Curzan at Instagram too?
Anne Curzan:
Yes.
Mignon Fogarty:
That's Anne with an E?
Anne Curzan:
It's Anne with an E.
Mignon Fogarty:
Wonderful. Well, thanks again for being here, Anne with an E. We've loved our conversation.
Anne Curzan:
Thank you for a wonderful and fun conversation.
Mignon Fogarty:
I hope you all enjoyed my conversation with Anne Curzan.
I'll be back Tuesday with our regular episode, And make sure to check your feed again Thursday for our next installment of Grammar Girl Conversations when I'll be talking with Hana Videen about weird medieval words for animals! You really want to hear why medieval people thought whales were evil.
That's all. Thanks for listening.