1000. In this special 1000th episode, I take the hot seat to answer your questions. Hear what made the first year of the podcast so wild, what I wish I had done differently, what mistakes I still make, how I still find topics after all these episodes, and the title of my secret dream show (hint: it involves penguins!). It's a celebration of language, learning, and the loyal listeners who made it all possible.
1000. In this special 1000th episode, I take the hot seat to answer your questions. Hear what made the first year of the podcast so wild, what I wish I had done differently, what mistakes I still make, how I still find fresh topics after all these years, and the title of my secret dream show (hint: it involves penguins!).
It's a celebration of language, learning, and the loyal listeners who made it all possible.
| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/episode-1000/transcript
| Please take our advertising survey. It helps! https://podsurvey.com/GRAMMAR
| Grammarpalooza (Get texts from Mignon!): https://joinsubtext.com/grammar or text "hello" to (917) 540-0876.
| Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates.
| Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475).
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
| Grammar Girl Social Media Links: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook. Instagram. LinkedIn. Threads. Bluesky. Mastodon.
1000GG. July 4, 2024. Listener Question Show
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. And today is episode 1,000, and that just blows my mind. Back in April, I read that only 0.14% of podcasts have made it to 1,000 episodes.
So I felt like I should do something special.
At first I thought "1000 episodes? Maybe I should take a day off!" But that, my friends, is not how you get to 1,000 episodes, so instead, I'm answering some of your questions — not about specific language topics, but about the show and bigger picture ideas about language.
You can think of this kind of like what happens when I give a radio interview. I've actually given hundreds of radio interviews over the years, but I'm sure most of you have never heard any of them.
So to get started, here's a good question from one of my Grammarpaloozians.
Hi, Grammar Girl.
This is Gillian from Canada.
First, I wanted to congratulate you on reaching a thousand episodes and thank you for the many years of valuable information.
Learning from you has significantly refined my writing in grammar.
As a longtime Grammar Girl podcast listener, I'm curious about your origin story.
Since you were an early adopter in the podcast space, what inspired you to start your podcast?
Thank you for all that you do, and I look forward to many more episodes.
Thanks so much Gillian, for the question and for supporting the show. And shout-out to Canada. I did do a series of radio appearances on the CBC way back in 2009, but even if you did hear those, you've probably forgotten by now.
Oh, and before I start, actually, I had to look up on my Wikipedia page that it was 2009, and, wow. My Wikipedia page is just woefully out of date. It has almost nothing I've done after about 2016. It doesn't have that I was on the Today Show. It doesn't have that I'm in the Podcast Hall of Fame. So much more. So if you're a big Wikipedia person, and you're bored or feeling generous, maybe take a look at my page.
Anyway … how did I get started?
Well, before I was Grammar Girl, I was a freelance writer and editor. I have an undergraduate degree in English, but I also have a master's in biology from Stanford, so I specialized in health, science, and tech writing. I did things like white papers, marketing materials, magazine articles. All kinds of stuff. But the work that paid the best, like writing manuals for DNA sequencers, was super boring, so as I built a better and better business, I ended up being just bored and restless. And at that point, I heard about this new thing called podcasting! So I decided to give it a try.
That was more than 18 years ago, and the first podcast I made was actually a science podcast called "Absolute Science" because podcast directories were alphabetical back then, so the name put it near the top of the list. And I LOVED doing it. I immediately started hearing from listeners, which is just something you didn't get back then from writing magazine articles. And I was learning things, and I wasn't bored anymore. It was great!
But between research and dealing with recording and editing interviews (which was a lot harder back then) it was also taking me 20 hours a week, which is an awful lot of time for a hobby. When you're a freelancer, time really is money, and I couldn't afford to keep doing it. BUT, I had fallen in love with podcasting.
So I looked around and thought "What else could I do?" And I realized I was always looking up rules in the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook and making little memory tricks for myself, and my editing clients were making the same mistakes over and over again, so I thought people might enjoy fun little tips … and find them useful.
So I went to my local coffee shop, The Kind Grind on the beach in Santa Cruz, which sadly, isn't there anymore, and wrote down three ideas on a napkin. And oh, do I wish I had kept that napkin!
But since I was already set up for podcasting, I had three episodes out within a week, and it was a much quicker show to produce because I didn't have to deal with all the problems of scheduling and recording interviews. And because the show was scripted, the audio editing took a lot less time. So yay, I could keep podcasting without going broke.
And then the most amazing thing happened. Grammar Girl just shot up the charts at iTunes. I barely did anything to promote it, but I was hearing from tons of listeners, and people were telling all their friends and co-workers, and the show briefly went all the way to number one, and it just didn't stop growing. That first year was wild. Just … wild.
And with a show that was so successful, I knew I had a business, and I launched the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network, and brought on people to do other podcasts — Money Girl, The Mighty Mommy, Modern Manners Guy, and more. A few months later, the Wall Street Journal chose Grammar Girl as the web pick of the day, I was approached by five New York publishers, and ended up doing a three-book deal with Macmillan. I was also on the Oprah Winfrey show and partnered with Macmillan to grow the podcast network.
Like I said, it was quite a year! So that's how I got started.
Thanks again for the question, Gillian.
Hi, this is Brian Dunning from the Skeptoid Podcast.
I'd like to know if Grammar Girl had never existed, what's a completely different podcast that you'd love to have done instead?
Thanks, Brian! Brian is a long-time podcaster too, and I believe he makes his podcast very much like I do: doing a lot of research and then writing a complete script, which is a pretty rare thing in the podcast world.
I probably would have been happy doing my science podcast if that had made sense at the time, but I get ideas for other podcasts I want to do all the time. So many! But I'll tell you the one that keeps coming back to me: "Everything Penguins!"
I love penguins. I can't get enough of watching them waddle around, and sometimes when I'm sad, Pat will ask if I want to watch videos of penguins pushing each other off cliffs to cheer myself up.
I want to travel the world interviewing penguin experts and meeting different kinds of penguins.
I imagine it would probably be a limited series because I'd run out of penguins and penguin experts, and it would certainly lose money, but if we're just dreaming here, it's "Everything Penguins!" That's a completely different podcast I'd love to do if I had to do something besides Grammar Girl.
And speaking of running out of topics, here's another question:
Hello, this is your old editor, Adam, calling from London, England.
Here's my question.
After releasing 1,000 episodes of Grammar Girl, how do you still come up with ideas for the podcast?
Surely you have answered every question there is to know about grammar or language.
How do you keep finding new things to talk about? Thank you.
Adam! It's so great to hear from you, and I hope you're enjoying your new life in London. I'm definitely enjoying my subscription to your Night Water newsletter.
When I started I definitely thought I'd run out of topics before now. Part of what's helped it keep going and stay interesting is that I've expanded the kind of thing I cover. In the early days, it was just tips on writing mechanics and commonly confused words. How to use commas, "which" versus "that," and so on.
But now, I actually have a lot of shows about interesting word origins like the recent show on words for walking where we talked about "traipse" and "perambulate." And I also like shows about groups of idioms, like all the idioms that include the word "blue": "blue moon," "blue language," and so on. So that's given me a much bigger pool of topics to work with.
And I still get new and interesting questions from listeners. It's amazing, but there really are just still things about this darn language that I haven't covered. But if you look at some of my favorite reference books — Garner's Modern English Usage and Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage — they are THICK. The newest Garners is more than 1,200 pages long, with pretty small type.
And then, sometimes, I'll realize it's been, like, seven years since I did a show about semicolons, and there are a lot of new listeners who've never heard that topic before, so I'll spruce up an old episode. And often I don't realize it's been that long because I answer questions for people, and I put together my LinkedIn Learning courses or my AP Style webinars that cover the common topics, so it feels like I've talked about it a lot and don't realize it's been so long since it's been in the podcast. And I think it's fine to update old topics. I rarely do straight reruns. I think I've maybe done 4 or 5 the whole time, when I was sick or something. I almost always add things to the episode, update things, and do a new recording because my audio set-up is a lot better than it used to be.
And I LOVE it when I'm able to put a new spin on an old topic, like back in February in episode 968 when the title of Taylor Swift's new album, "The Tortured Poets Department," gave me a new way to talk about apostrophes in more common phrases like "farmers market" and "Veteran's Day."
So that's how I do it, and I guess, if I think about it, maybe if I could do it with grammar, there's more hope for "Everything Penguins!"
Hi, Mignon
It's Rob Reinalda.
Again, congratulations on this great milestone.
I have two questions for you and you can choose one or the other or both or neither.
First, knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently in the early days of the Grammar Girl podcast?
Thanks. Be well. Talk to you soon.
Thanks so much, Rob! Rob is a freelance editor I met many years ago when he worked at Ragan Communications, and we've become friends over time, and he even did some guest writing for the podcast, so you may recognize his name if you're a long-time listener. He's also the winner of the ACES Robinson Prize for editing.
So … what do I wish I had done differently?
Well, these days what's on my mind is that I really wish I had started doing a regular interview episode sooner. I love doing them, and from everything I can see, all of you really like them too. And they're so much easier to do than they were in the early days of podcasting when I was struggling with my science podcast.
But let's see. The early days. I guess knowing what I know now, I would have asked for more help sooner. It took me years to hire an assistant, and I only did it after Stever Robbins, who was the host of the Get-It-Done Guy productivity podcast really badgered me into doing it.
Stever's really smart. If you ever have the chance to take his advice, you should. And even with these interview podcasts, I'm only able to do them because of extra help I'm getting from the people on the Quick and Dirty Tips team, and I could have pushed to get more help years ago. But I'm not really a pusher. But I should have been.
Yes, so if anyone else listening is starting a business, get help so you can grow faster. Don't try to do everything yourself. I'm still kind of bad about that.
And someone else also asked Rob's second question, so I'm going to move on, but don't think I'm cutting him off.
Hey, Grammar Girl.
It's David H. Lawrence, the 17th, and I'm wondering what the most fascinating one or two ideas or concepts or things you didn't know about grammar that you found out by doing your podcast.
Thanks, David! For those of you who don't remember, David H. Lawrence the 17th is teaching the audiobook narration course I'm taking right now, which I love, by the way. I'm having so much fun. Still struggling to write my Hardy Boys adaptation, but at least I have some accountability, so I'm making progress. And David is also an actor, so if you see him on a video or something, you might recognize him. He played Eric Doyle, the puppet master, on the TV show "Heroes."
So I have learned so many interesting things! That's one of the things I love about making the podcast.
I remember one thing that just blew my mind very early on was learning that people spoke French in England for, like, 200 years, and that's where we got so many of the words derived from French in English. Not all of them, but a lot, like a lot of the words for government and cooking.
When the Duke of Normandy conquered England in 1066 (earning the name William the Conqueror), he brought Norman French to the island. I just couldn't believe I didn't know that. I was an English major, but I had never learned anything about the history of the language (and apparently also not much about the history of England either).
And because I was so surprised, 1066 is one of the only years I remember as having historical significance. I mean, I know 1776. 1066. And I can't think of any others where if you just said the year, I'd instantly know what you mean. And when I visited London a few years ago, we went to the White Tower, and I got really excited when I saw a bust of William the Conqueror. Like, I pulled Pat over and said "That's him! Look at him! He's why we have so many words from French!"
And I think the other really transformative thing I learned, that is more of a concept that happened over time, is realizing that what I thought of as hard and fast rules … almost all of them were different in the past. Writers used way more commas in the 1800s. Nouns were capitalized in the U.S. Constitution. Our grandparents said they "were graduated from high school" instead of they "graduated from high school" or "graduated high school."
We exist at just one POINT in time for our language, and it changed before, and it'll change again. That doesn't mean we should just abandon all the rules and nobody needs editors anymore, but I don't get too emotionally attached to rules either.
Thanks, David. And here's another interesting question that's kind of related. I don't have a recording, but Wonderdog on Mastodon asked how I chose the "two friends I used as examples in the pod and your book."
Well, those friends are the two buddies Squiggly, the bumbling yellow snail who loves chocolate, and Aardvark, a grumpy blue aardvark who loves fishing.
When I was creating the podcast, I knew I wanted it to be fun and friendly and funny as well as educational, so I wanted silly cartoon friends to use over and over in the example sentences. I imagined building a story about them as the episodes went on, which I haven't done, but I do think sometimes about writing a children's book about Squiggly and Aardvark going on adventures.
In my mind, they were kind of like Bert and Ernie from "Sesame Street" or Felix and Oscar from "The Odd Couple." I took some classes at U.C. Santa Cruz, and Squiggly is definitely modeled on Sammy, the U.C. Santa Cruz banana slug mascot. Aardvark is more of a mystery. I don't know. He just popped into my head.
But the reason it's related to the last question is that a few years into the podcast, I learned that the names Squiggly and Aardvark are inherently funny because certain words just sound funny.
Kevin Cummings wrote a piece about comedy writing for me, and that's when I learned that words with Q sounds and K sounds are known by comedians to be funny! Apparently, a kidney is funnier in a punchline than a pancreas. So maybe that's why I thought Aardvark was a good name to go with Squiggly.
I'm going to play the next two questions together because they're kind of related:
Mignon, it's Roy Peter Clark.
How do you help writers distinguish between grammar as a rule and grammar as a tool, that is between conventional grammar and what is sometimes called rhetorical grammar?
Keep doing your wonderful work.
IS CONVERSATION HINDERED BY GRAMMAR? PAUL CHAMBERS ENHANCED ON iMAC
My question is, do you think conversations are hindered by the extensive rules of English grammar?
First, thanks to both of you!
And first, I don't really think conversations are hindered by grammar rules because I think most people ignore the rules when they're having conversations. I've transcribed a lot of interviews in my life, and I can tell you most people definitely don't speak with proper grammar. That's another reason my show is normally scripted. I don't speak perfectly all the time, but people expect a show about grammar to have perfect language, so the only way to make that happen is with a script. People don't even speak in complete sentences.
It's why you often hear advice NOT to use proper grammar in the dialogue in fiction. If you do, your characters won't sound natural.
But I will say that WRITING can be hindered by getting too caught up in the rules of grammar. When I first started writing Grammar Girl, I absolutely noticed that my writing got worse. It stopped flowing because I was so conscious of my grammar, it kept me from writing the way I always had. I was a good writer! But I started second guessing every construction, every comma, and it messed me up for a while.
So I alway tell people to just write a first draft without thinking about the grammar, and then fix all the problems later in editing. You know, and learn grammar rules over time so you create fewer problems. But don't get hung up on it WHILE you're trying to be creative.
And to Roy's question, I started out teaching conventional grammar— stuff like punctuation and subject-verb agreement. But I've added in rhetorical grammar, which is stuff like how your writing affects your tone or your persuasiveness. There's some overlap, like in a recent show where I talked about how to use commas, parentheses, and dashes, which have mechanical elements, but which one you choose also changes the tone of your sentence. While conventional grammar is a bunch of rules that come with this sense of right and wrong that can cause some people to stress out, rhetorical grammar is a tool you can CHOOSE to use to actually enhance your conversations or writing.
The difference isn't really something I point out a lot, but maybe I should. I'll make a note of it. Your books do that well. Roy, Roy Peter Clark, is an incredibly accomplished writing teacher with a bunch of great books.
And this question is making me think of my interview with Roy back in 2023 in episode 923 where we talked about his book "Tell It Like It Is" which is about writing with what he calls "civic clarity," and which gets more deep into that rhetorical side of grammar.
Thanks, Roy.
Hello my friend, this is CC Chapman.
Congratulations on your thousands episode. I'm so proud of you. I'm so, I'm so worth it.
Happy to call you a friend that makes me so happy. I got a question for you. You wanted a question.
I'm just curious, even with all the knowledge you have and all the knowledge you share, what's like the mistake you make all the time still? I know we all have those quirks where we type a word wrong, we know how to spell it or a grammar mistake. I'm just curious, what mistake do you make all the time even after all these years?
Take care. Congratulations again.
Thank you so much, CC. I met CC so many years ago I can't even remember when. It was definitely at some podcasting conference because CC is also a podcaster from the very early days of podcasting. He's now a business professor at Wheaton College and the co-author of the bestselling book "Content Rules."
And that's such a great question because I still do definitely mess things up! A couple of days ago I looked up my own chart on how to conjugate "lay" versus "lie." And my fingers will still sometimes maddeningly type I-T apostrophe S when I know darn well the right word shouldn't have an apostrophe.
I'm especially proud of a memory trick I came up with for how to spell "bureaucracy" back in 2019 in episode 662 because until then I don't think I EVER got it right the first time, and since then, I get it right every time. The short version is that it involves a burrow putting on perfume. The burrow gives you the "bur" part, and the perfume gives you the "eau" part. Sometimes I feel like if that's all people ever get from me, I'll have made the world a better place because I know so many people who are like me and can't spell that word!
And I love this question because I think it's important for people to know that EVERYONE (everyone!) makes mistakes. In the very early days of the podcast, part of my sign-off was a line that started "I don't claim to be perfect." Pat talked me into taking it out because he said I was undermining credibility, but it's still my vibe. I know a lot more now than when I started, but I'm not perfect. Nobody is perfect. Just do your best. Look things up when you don't know them. Make up silly memory tricks. Keep trying. Thanks, C.C.
And finally, I'll end with not a question, but just a nice message:
Hey, Mignon, Michael Sheehy calling. Just wanted to congratulate you on your thousand podcast and keep up the great work.
Thanks, Michael. I met Michael YEARS ago when he came to one of my book signings, and we've followed each other on social media ever since. And I have to say I've loved meeting ALL the people who've come out for events like that. I haven't done any in a long time, but I have the best memories of the ones I did.
So thank you, Michael, for sticking with me all these years, and thank you everyone because I wouldn't have gotten to 1,000 episodes without all of you who listen. Because of all of you, I get to do this thing I love, and I couldn't be more grateful.
So I'll be back next week for episode 1,001.
And just some quick administrative stuff before I go. Thanks to the many people at Macmillan — Quick and Dirty Tips — who have worked on Grammar Girl over the years, and to the current team: Holly Hutchings, Davina Tomlin, Morgan Christianson, Brannan Goetschius, and Nathan Semes.
Thanks to the Grammarpaloozians who support the show and get fun text messages from me every week.
And since this is my mission this summer: if you're an educator, check out my LinkedIn Learning writing courses to use in your classes this fall. They're free through many university libraries. Free! Try them!
And that, my friends, is all. Thanks for listening.