1004. This week, Karen Yin, author of "The Conscious Style Guide," discusses the concept of conscious language and its importance in promoting equity and respect. We explore the differences between conscious language and political correctness, the evolution of the singular "they," and how to navigate language change. Karen also shares insights on addressing language mishaps, the importance of context in language use, and how to approach controversial terms and phrases.
1004. This week, Karen Yin, author of "The Conscious Style Guide," discusses the concept of conscious language and its importance in promoting equity and respect. We explore the differences between conscious language and political correctness, the evolution of the singular "they," and how to navigate language change. Karen also shares insights on addressing language mishaps, the importance of context in language use, and how to approach controversial terms and phrases.
MIGNON: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I'm here with Karen Yin. Karen is an award winning editor and writer. Pointer named her website ConsciousStyleGuide.com one of the top tools for journalists. She's an official member of the Chicago Manual of Style Advisory Board, and we're here today to talk about her fabulous new book, "The Conscious Style Guide: A Flexible Approach to Language that Includes, Respects, and Empowers."
Karen Yin, welcome to the Grammar Girl Podcast.
KAREN: Hi, Mignon. Thank you so much for having me. It's such a delight to be here.
MIGNON: Yeah. I'm thrilled to have you. And so I think it's important for people to know that you actually coined the term "conscious language." That's your term. So why don't you tell us what that means?
KAREN: I did because I was, in the early days of my website, I would describe the kind of language that I was covering in this really unwieldy kind of never-ending sentence. I would say, "It is kind language. It is respectful language." It had all these adjectives. And I figured if I just say, "Conscious language is language that promotes equity," that really helps get the point across.
So I learned to really tighten things up so that … because using conscious language also means saying things in a way so that your audience understands it. So yeah, everything is a work in progress, and "conscious language," the term, was meant to cover all these different types of things that I was observing going on, but it didn't have a label.
It didn't have a name. And as we know, giving things a name makes it a thing, and it allows us to actually talk about it.
MIGNON: Yeah. And so, how does it differ from what people think of as maybe politically correct language?
KAREN: That's such a great question. Politically correct language, from what I've observed, is language that you use to try and remove offensiveness, but you apply it without context. So, it's basically, "these are the list of words that you should use, or you should avoid." And you use it for all situations.
Conscious language really takes context into account because in my book, I talk about how things like slurs and stereotypes in the right context can actually promote equity.
MIGNON: Now, how is that?
KAREN: For example, like you belong to several groups. For example, you're a woman. Like amongst women, we have jokes about ourselves. We have stereotypes for ourselves, and when you are with a group of women, we feel safe.
There's that safety factor that makes us understand, well, we are not diminishing anyone, we are actually bonding through these shared experiences of ourselves. Whereas if somebody outside of our group, let's say a man, uses the same stereotype, we're not sure if they see us as a full human being. And that's where the element of threat comes in.
So it's no longer funny. We're no longer bonding. So the context, like who says it, really matters.
MIGNON: That's so interesting. You know, another thing that jumped out at me as I was reading your book, and I want to point out to people, this is not a book … it’s not just a bunch of entries. "Do this. Don't do that." There's a lot of philosophy in the book. And it's really informed. I mean, books with entries are informative too, but it's informative in a way that's more than just, “Use this word, don't use that.” And it occurred to me that conscious language is actually a lot of times more accurate language too. Maybe talk about that.
KAREN: It absolutely is. And as an editor, using accurate language is a central duty to be accurate when appropriate. So conscious language is like, some people would refer to me as Asian, but I prefer Asian American because Asian, that's a completely different nationality. You're talking about, you know, so that kind of accuracy really helps you give attention appropriately to the group you are actually talking about, right?
If you conflate Asian and Asian American, you're really doing Americans who are Asian a disservice. You're also merging stereotypes and cultural aspects that we may not share. As an American who happens to be ethnically Chinese, I don't share a lot of the cultural Chinese things.
I do some because my mom is also Chinese. But as somebody who was born in New York and raised here, I am not culturally Chinese as much as you think I am.
MIGNON: Right. Right. And that reminds me, you dedicated your book to a wonderful man named Harry Furman, and you called him "aka the Hyphen Killer." Explain why that's important.
KAREN: So Henry, he wrote a very pivotal article for "Conscious Style Guide" about how, if you hyphenate words, phrases like "Asian-American" or "African-American," you're actually saying we are not real Americans because without the hyphen, you are saying this person is American, and "these are Asian" just describes the type of American they are, but hyphenating it makes it a whole different thing: We're not Americans. We're Asian-American.
And he was trying to get people to shift their thinking. Like that little line, that little hyphen is so powerful. Are you aware that that is what you are conveying when you use the hyphen?
MIGNON: Right. Like there's other instances where, I think you have a great quote from someone in the book where you might say, “I'm a tall American," and that's not hyphenated because "tall" is just an adjective.
KAREN: Exactly. Yeah.
MIGNON: Yeah, well, another thing that you talk about throughout the book is how, you know, it's not set in stone. And even really well-meaning people can have different opinions about what is appropriate language and what isn't. So what do you … like, with "Latinx," or "Latino," or "Latine," or identity-first language versus person-first language, you know, those are… what do you do with those examples where people, really well-meaning people disagree about what terms to use?
KAREN: Yeah, you're going to find a disagreement. And to me, that means that language is alive and healthy, because if we all use the same language, I would start to worry that it was ceasing to grow and ceasing to evolve because a language that does not evolve is by definition dead. So there are many ways of handling when your language is different from someone else's or when you are, when you hear someone use language that you yourself would not choose.
One is to actually give them the benefit of the doubt. If they're an ally and not somebody who is obviously hostile to the idea of inclusive and conscious language, then I would pay attention to what the meaning behind their words.
So I may disagree with, for example, if they say “girl,” instead of like a place where I would say “woman," I actually want you to like, “What about it? What about girls or women?” So I want to hear for the deeper meaning instead of criticizing them or judging them for choosing a word that I personally find inappropriate, and I think that by supporting allies this way, it can really help us make faster progress toward equity because something that I'm conscious of as somebody who has been an activist since really young is all the infighting and how infighting really stops us from finding out, “What do you really mean by that?”
How can we use that to advance our cause?
MIGNON: Mm hmm. Yeah, you reminded me. I get that sometimes about Grammar Girl. You know, some people are like, how can you call yourself a girl?
KAREN: Yeah.
MIGNON: And well, one, I was a lot younger when I started the show. But, two, you know, I did it very consciously actually because I know people are so stressed out about grammar.
It can be a really intimidating subject. So when I started the show, I did a lot of things like also having a cartoon character as the avatar to just make it as friendly and unintimidating as possible. And so I actively chose to call, to use the word "girl." And I knew someone once who insisted on calling me "Grammar Woman." And, you know, I actually found it really annoying.
KAREN: Right.
MIGNON: He thought he was empowering me, but it wasn't my chosen word. And so I let it go because that's how I am, but it was a weird thing.
KAREN: I think that's such a perfect example of strategy, right? So somebody might say, “Well, using a 'girl' when you're a full-grown woman, that's sexist language," but the thing is you chose it very consciously. You want to make a certain kind of impact. And not only that, but as somebody who is a girl or a woman, you have the right to self-label, right?
So like, that's something else that I put forward in my book, which is if somebody describes themself in a certain way, that's part of the conversation. That is valid, and there's no need to correct them and say, “No, no, you're not a person who is disabled.” I mean, sometimes they'll say, “You're not a disabled person. You are a person who is disabled.”
Like they'll correct identity-first language so that it's in a format that they were told somewhere down the line is appropriate for all disability identities, which is not conscious.
MIGNON: Right. Even though they mean well, I think…
KAREN: They mean well, yeah.
MIGNON: Usually they mean well. But it is interesting, and there are choices, you know, when I was reading the part about words with difficult pasts, troublesome pasts, you know, a word — and I run across that all the time because I'm often looking at the origin of words and phrases for the podcast — and many years ago I discovered that “hysterical” comes from the idea that only women get upset.
I think it goes back to the Greek or Latin root or word for womb. “Hysterical” is very much a negative thing about women and most people, but most people don't know that. So I personally have chosen not to use “hysterical” when I mean something's funny. I always say “hilarious," but it is something where people can make a choice, even knowing the history, they might still choose to use “hysterical." And you talk about how in different situations, you talked about “cakewalk” versus “going off the reservation." Those are two that are really different, and you have different advice about those two.
KAREN: Yeah in that section, I wanted to kind of help people learn to think critically about what they believe in and what their tendency is, because unless you know how you think and how you would react to those things, it's really hard to adopt or reject language shifts if you don't know where you currently are.
So with “hysterical” and other words with questionable origins, I think those are a really great test for people to say, well, with the understanding that words like “hysteria,” you know, had this negative origin, there's “How do I handle this? Do I use it for men more?” to balance out the application for women. “Or do I use it less?”
So I don't completely avoid it forever and ever. I just pull back. Or there are all these different approaches to language. Like something I wanted people to think about with origin, especially, is “How consistent are you?” If you avoid words that have a sexist origin, what about all of the other words with sexist, or racist, or negative origins.
How consistent are you? Is it feasible for you to be actively avoiding all those words? Because you're talking about a lot of English. If you want to avoid all words with bad origins, what if a word has an excellent origin, but is currently skunked? How would you balance that out?
So how much does origin really matter? I personally don't give origin that much weight. What matters more to me is how that marginalized group thinks about a word now. Like, even if that word had emerged from the best of intentions and slowly became skunked or became offensive, how marginalized groups treat that word now or receive that word now matters. That's what matters to me. I don't care about where it came from. There are times when you can describe the origin of a word, and I get this ick feeling, well then I'm just going to avoid it. So for me, it's kind of case by case, but I always defer to the group that it directly affects.
So I don't really worry about origin that much. I go directly to them. I try to research “How do they feel about this word?” That's what I go by. Not much thought, not much angst.
MIGNON: Yeah, and if you need to ask, how can you, what is a good way to ask someone or a group if a word is bothersome for them?
KAREN: A lot of marginalized groups already have guides that they have published for free online. So all of those, that's actually where ConsciousStyleGuide.com came from. As an editor, I was accumulating all these amazing guides that these different groups were writing about what terminology to use, like how to frame certain situations, their perspective on historical events.
And I was like, “Do people know about these?” and through some conversations with editor friends, they were like, “Oh no, we don't know about these.” So even as far back as, I think it was 2011, I was like, “I'm going to put all of these on one website so people can access them,” because you can't raise awareness without like, you know, people can't use it if they're not aware about it.
So it wasn't until I quit this job that I was able to launch ConsciousStyleGuide.com in 2015. So I would recommend checking my website first because that way the issue with turning to your friend who is of that community and saying, “Hey, how do you feel about this?” I always imagine “How many times are they put in that position where they have to perform the labor of answering questions?” and being asked because they're seen as that one thing. And as somebody who is part of many marginalized groups, it gets really tiresome if people only see me as Asian or they only see me as queer.
I'm more than that. So if you were to turn to somebody at your workplace or a colleague, I would suggest developing a really strong rapport where perhaps over the course of a year or more, you ask them all kinds of questions, not just related to their identity or what you perceive as their identity. Make them feel valued and equal to you.
And not just as a member of some marginalized group, because we are more than how we have been marginalized, you know? If you only ask a Black person about diversity questions that just gets really frustrating, I would imagine. I'm more than that.
MIGNON: Yeah. I want your favorite bread recipe, too, and maybe a park you like to go to.
KAREN: Exactly, exactly. So to avoid those awkward interactions where you're putting someone on the spot where they've been on the spot forever, consult the guides that are already out there. Those were created voluntarily by people who are usually either activists or experts in that community. They're already giving you this free advice.
MIGNON: Yeah, and you pointed out another thing, too. That no one person speaks for their whole community, so if you ask one person…
KAREN: Exactly.
MIGNON: You know, that person's opinion may not be representative of the bigger picture either.
KAREN: Right. Right. Because, you know, sometimes I have tried to ask my mom questions about Chinese culture, and she is really not all that culturally Chinese. Like even though she was born there, she grew up in Taiwan. Because I would ask her things like, “Mama, is it true that whenever you give someone something, they have to refuse three times, and that you have to offer three or four times, right?”
Because this is a cultural custom that I read about all the time. And she was like, “No, no, just do it once.” But if I went by what she said, that would be wrong for a lot of people of the Chinese culture, because I have observed, you do need to ask three times, and you need to keep insisting on giving them something before they'll accept it.
So my mom's just one person. That's just one clue. Can't go by one person.
MIGNON: Interesting. I want to talk about the singular “they” a little bit. So, I teach LinkedIn Learning classes, and I have a section on singular “they," and someone asked a question that I actually didn't know how to answer. So, the style guides all say that you should check with a person and ask for their preferred pronouns, but what if you can't? What if you can't, for some reason, can’t find out? Should you … is it context dependent? Like, if I'm for some reason looking at a picture of an 80-year-old little old lady, do I just go with “she"? Do I always use “they”? What should you do when you actually can't ask?
KAREN: I do my best to find their website or a social media bio or someplace where they might have their pronoun. So on my website, I don't say pronouns: “she/they," but in my bio I say “she” so that if you're reading it, you will go, “Okay, well she uses at least feminine pronouns.” So I would do that research.
If you're unable to find that, I would look for an article or an interview where there has been some, maybe secondhand engagement with this person. If it's really, really impossible to determine what pronouns they use, I think it's safe and reasonable to default to “they/them.”
The same reason why we could call anybody human or person or individual. These are just gender-free terms that are fair.
MIGNON: Yeah. Yeah. I had a hard time imagining a situation where you actually wouldn't be able to find out in some way. So I think it's a rare situation too. And I did do some research, and I noticed that there were at least one or two style guides that also, besides yours, which is also a very credible — "Conscious Style Guide" — that also recommended defaulting to “they/them.”
KAREN: Yeah, you know, because it's… style guides actually are supposed to help you by making it easier to be practical, right? So when you have a style rule that you're operating by, that means you don't need to consider each situation really hard. If you have a rule, you just apply that rule when you sense that something may be happening where you need to do deeper research or you need to break this rule, then you are free to be flexible.
Like all style guides encourage flexibility for your own context. So yeah.
MIGNON: … Break and then when we come back, I actually have another question about the singular “they,” and then we'll talk about some other specific topics as well. We'll be right back.
//
Welcome back. So I wanted to talk a little bit more about the singular “they," because that has come up many times over the last 10 or 12 years. I've covered it multiple times. And every time the style books have changed a little bit. To me, it's almost passe. Like, I don't even bat an eye when I see it anymore.
It’s just very normal for me to see it, but I run into people still who haven't even heard of it. And I'm always shocked, but you know, I'm a writer, I'm an editor, I live in the language world, and a lot of people don't, obviously. Or I'll do my AP style webinar, and I'll be talking about how AP style says to use the singular “they," and I'll see people in the comments typing, "I would never get away with that at work." And so I wanted you to talk about sort of the way language changes and particularly the singular “they” and how that's changed over time and maybe what you feel like it tells us about conscious language.
KAREN: I think singular “they” has so many benefits, and when I was a young editor, like right out of college, I had my first job editing. I remember immediately choosing singular “they” because “he/she” was just so awkward, and I wanted some more variety. So even back then, before the law recognized nonbinary people, it was already really useful.
So my focus on impact in the book actually comes from, I guess a whole lifetime of being an editor and really examining how my editorial choices improve the impact for my readers. So a lot of people who are resistant, maybe in a workplace, may realize that, well, there are nonbinary people.
How are you going to refer to them using only binary pronouns? So maybe that will be the push. That helps them, um, adopt the singular “they” more often. And then once you begin to use “they” for an individual, then maybe they will also become accustomed to using that for somebody whose binary pronoun is known.
For example, like the reason why I say you can use "she" or "they" for me is because, why do you need to gender me so hard with a pronoun? You know, why is this like … I used to, in my talks, I would talk about what if we had racialized pronouns where you said, “Oh, Karen went to the bookstore and bought Asian-self a book.” Like, why would you need to be so specific? Why are you making race relevant? Similarly, why are we making gender relevant? So, hopefully, however people come upon the use of the singular "they," it would open up new doors for the way they think. And the facility and the usefulness of the singular "they" hopefully will just win out.
Also, like so many people have already shown how even people who are actively criticizing the singular "they," they use the singular “they” in their speech. I've seen so many videos and posts, so it's like, well, I think you're already doing it. If you're objecting to it in formal contexts, there's no need.
Editors have already accepted it. If it helps your audience, there's no reason to avoid it. It does not cause confusion the way you would think.
MIGNON: Yeah. Yeah. I think many years ago I offended a young person on our team because she really wanted me to cover the singular “they” and I'm like, “Everybody knows about that. I'm tired of it. You know, I'm not going to do it.” And I think they were really upset with me because I wasn't still out there fighting the fight, but I feel like the fight is over, but I know I've come to realize for a lot of people it isn't. And, you know what, one thing I just have to tell you the story, you know, I've talked about the singular “they” for years. And then not that long ago, we had someone join our team who uses the singular “they." And I was so excited because I finally had a chance to use it in my own real life. And I can't tell you how many times I messed it up.
Over and over and over again, I messed it up, and I ended up feeling stupid and old and like a failure. And it made me realize that, okay, one, you have to practice and you have to be kind with yourself and give yourself room to learn. But also if someone like me is having that kind of problem and those feelings, a lot of people are, and I recognize that it didn't have to be that way, but I think a lot of people, when they start feeling stupid and old and like a failure, they just start feeling really negatively about the whole thing. And then they start just hating on the idea of it because they feel bad about themselves because of their inability to “get it right." So I'm hopeful. It was a really humbling experience for me because I thought I was all modern and with it and would have no problem with it, but I did. So, you know, the people that I was around showed me a lot of grace, and I really appreciated that.
Karen: Yeah, you know, changing your language is difficult, especially with something like pronouns, because throughout our lives, I mean, not only has it been deeply ingrained in our language, but we were also criticized for not using the correct pronoun, for not using binary pronouns. So now we are being asked to, almost for each person, reconsider the pronoun that we're using.
I often use pronouns incorrectly when it's someone that I've known for many years. And back then they used a completely different pronoun, and that is when I have the hardest time like, “Oh yeah, they're he now," like, that's when I have trouble. Part of the reason, actually, a lot of the reason why I wrote "The Conscious Style Guide" was to help people understand that these mistakes are common.
There are ways around it. For example, learning to apologize. It's like when you pick up any other skill, like let's say tumbling, well, there's a correct way to tumble and an incorrect way to tumble. And if you do it incorrectly, how do you recover? So in this book, I want people to know, well, there's a way to recover.
Will it be super successful? While that depends on a lot of things, but this is something that we can do so that it takes the pressure off of having to be like uber-correct all the time. I am not correct all the time. I also don't want to be correct all the time. I am okay with giving myself leeway and surrounding myself with people who also make errors, and we forgive each other for making these errors.
People who are really intense about using the correct language. Their version of correct language is probably not my version of correct language. So to me, their correct language may be incorrect. So you have all these misalignments everywhere. And part of what "The Conscious Style Guide" does is it reassures you that this is going to happen.
Misalignment happens for so many reasons. For example, when you call yourself Grammar Girl, some people might criticize that, but your reason was strategy. It was thought out. It was not just automatic language. So the section on how misalignment happens in my book, hopefully, will make it more understandable when people mess up. I think messing up is so expected and so normal that when we jump on each other, when we jump on allies for messing up, we're really causing them to shrink away from using conscious language more because they might be worried. “Well, what if this is not conscious enough? Or what if I say the wrong thing to this person of a different culture here?” If we made it more okay for people to choose words that we are not aligned with, I think that will help more people stay in the conscious language movement.
And then we can build right without these allies alongside us. We are losing their perspectives, their ideas. We cannot build together. Who are we building with? We're just trying to forge a path with fewer people. And I think that's what makes it more difficult for marginalized people: losing allies who have more influence and power.
MIGNON: I love your approach to this so much. It's so thoughtful. And the last thing I wanted to talk to you about, well, one thing I find myself wondering actually is do people confess to you a lot? Do you, feel like I'm confessing all my errors, and I know you don't, you don't call them errors and, but the conversation, I'm thinking of all the things, “Oh, I want to talk to Karen about this. Cause there's this thing I did wrong, and I don't necessarily feel good about it.”
KAREN: It's funny that you bring that up. So when I was just starting out as an editor, I realized that if I sent emails that were perfectly spelled and with all the correct capitalization, people would always write back and say, “Oh, I'm so afraid that I'm going to say something wrong and spell something wrong.”
And so what I did was I stopped capitalizing.
MIGNON: Oh my gosh.
KAREN: Okay. So just imagine, right, an editor, you're talking to the editor and then everything is lowercase in their emails. I mean, people stopped expressing that fear. So as somebody who people see as a leader in conscious language, I also take care to just be goofy and be funny and around the subject of conscious language.
This is on purpose, right? I'm a goofball on purpose because if I came to you and I was like super academic, and I had a tight little button down top on and, I don't know, that might make you feel like you also have to sit up, and you also have to speak perfectly. So I want people to be comforted by that.
MIGNON: That’s great. That's one thing I noticed when I joined, sort of the editing community many years ago, you know, started writing to other people who were prominent writers and editors. I noticed that a lot of them were much more casual in their emails than I would have expected. And it really did put me at ease. I mean, nobody went so far as to not capitalize. But you know, I did notice people writing “gonna” or things that you wouldn't necessarily expect from a “language leader," you know?
KAREN: Right, right.
MIGNON: It was nice actually.
KARE: Yeah. So my latest thing is when I'm corresponding with somebody who reached out to me for some language thing or work thing is I'm like, “Okay, who's going to use an emoji first?” You know?
MIGNON: I use a lot of emoji.
KAREN: I feel like that completely shifts the whole context and then from then on like they are using emojis and like people are like, just, it just changes the whole mood of the exchange, which I like, which I prefer.
MIGNON: That's so interesting.
KAREN: Yeah.
MIGNON: The last thing I wanted to talk about is your name. So your name is Karen, Karen Yin, and the name Karen has become sort of an insult. And last year sometime, I had someone actually write up a piece about Karen and also Lazy Susan as these names that had become you know, slurs almost.
And I ended up killing the story because I realized no matter how good it was — there was nothing wrong with the story and I paid the writer — but I realized I was never going to be comfortable running this piece. It just felt just too difficult to me, but it feels like something worth having a conversation about, but not something that I was comfortable going out and saying, “It's this way, it's that way, do this, don't do that.” I just couldn't do it. And I wonder, I would like to talk about it. So as a Karen, how do you feel about this?
KAREN: I think about the word Karen a lot and how it has become like a slur. First, it started off as a funny meme about maybe a white woman, a blonde white woman with a certain haircut complaining to the manager. Like back then that was kind of, it wasn't a slur yet, right? And then it started to morph, and in "The Conscious Style Guide," I talk a lot about consequence.
Consequence is one of the five components of conscious language. The others being content, context, consequence, and then complexity and compassion. So if we were to look at the consequence of using the Karen meme, the way it's being used, then I would ask myself, “Does it promote equity? Does it promote liberation?”
And as long as it is being used to point out when a person is calling the police on a Black person for doing everyday things, like maybe having a barbecue or, you know, mowing their lawn or going swimming for no reason at all. As long as it is being used to call out acts of racism like that, then I am for it.
I recognize that it's easier for me to say that I'm for the Karen meme when it's used to call out racism. Because I'm not a white person, and I imagine that if I were white, and even if I were a white person and a blonde person, it may be harder for me. But hopefully, I can kind of like, step back and say, “What is this doing for the Black community? Is it helping?”
And right now, the answer is yes. If it continues to morph and people are just using it to criticize any woman who brings up a complaint … complaining is okay. I think that more, sometimes more people should complain. We should be allowed to express dissatisfaction or grievance.
Like expressing a grievance, there's nothing inherently racist about that. So, it kind of is going that way. Like "Karen" is now being applied to situations where it's not really promoting equity at all. You're just using it as a slur. And then things like Lazy Susan, and what's the other one?
There's one for Chatty. Oh, yeah, Chatty Cathy. So I would kind of pull back and say, “Well, which group is being oppressed? Or are you perpetuating the demeaning of any group?” And the answer is no, it has not reached the point where it's not being associated with a marginalized group. So if you say "Lazy Susan," it's not like, “Oh, Susan is associated with a lesbian, and by saying Lazy Susan, you're criticizing lesbians.”
It is just offensive. And in the book, I talk about how to discern between offensive language and oppressive language. For us to want to change our language to be more conscious, "Lazy Susan" is very, very low priority for me because it is not demeaning any group,
MIGNON: Mm hmm.
KAREN: Right? It's just a funny saying.
MIGNON: Yeah, right. And that's one thing, one final takeaway from your book is, nobody can do everything in there. It's a whole book full of wonderful philosophy, but also a lot of things that are troublesome language, and none of us are going to do everything, you know?
KAREN: Yeah.
MIGNON: Yeah, you're not going to stop saying "Lazy Susan" and "Chatty Cathy" and “low man on the totem pole," because that doesn't even have any hierarchical meaning in the Native American culture.
And there are just so many things. But so, you know, wonderful. "The Conscious Style Guide." It's a wonderful book. It's filled with practical advice, but also just insightful philosophy that will make you think more deeply about language. I liked it so much I wrote one of the blurbs on the back.
KAREN: Yes, I want to thank you so much, Mignon, because you actually had a big part in my journey to publication, because I think we were Zooming about something completely different. And I happened to mention that I was writing a book and you said, "Would you like me to introduce you to my agent, Laurie Abkemeier?"
And I was like, “Well, yes!” And not only did you save me some angst in trying to query agents, but oh my gosh, Laurie is amazing. She is the first person I thank in the acknowledgments, I say she is sharp as heck because she is, and then for you to be gracious enough to be one of my first readers and to give me such an awesome blurb, I really appreciate it.
And thank you for being an amazing ally.
MIGNON: Well, you're welcome. Well, I've known about your website for many years. I knew it's so valuable. I knew your book was going to be fantastic. And Laurie represents me and a few other language people too. So I knew she'd be a really great agent for you, and she watches out for her writers. She's wonderful.
So I'm glad that that worked out.
KAREN: It absolutely did.
MIGNON: Yeah. So for people who want to find you, tell them where to go to find you online.
KAREN: Um, I try to put everything on KarenYin.com or ConsciousStyleGuide.com. So, all the social media stuff is there, all the articles are there, I'll just say that to keep it simple. And then if you want to subscribe to the newsletter, uh, to my author newsletter or to the conscious language one, it's all on those websites.
So just keep those two URLs handy.
MIGNON: Wonderful. KarenYin.com. K A R E N. I've known Karens spelled with C too. So K A R E N Y I N. com. Thanks again so much, Karen.
KAREN: Thank you.
MIGNON: I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. That was actually the last Grammar Girl Conversations for the summer. We're taking a break. We, I will be back in September with more interviews to fill up the fall season. It'll be great. And in the meantime, I will continue to have the regular weekly old-school Grammar Girl Show.
See you then.