ReThinking with Adam Grant
Decoding Gen-Z slang and grammar pet peeves with linguist Anne Curzan
July 2, 2024
[00:00:00] Anne Curzan:
I think part of being human is that almost all of us, if not all of us enjoy language. We like to play with it. Maybe it's that you like to rap or pun, and then when you say something like, I can explain why Colonel is spelled the way it is. People are really curious.
[00:00:18] Adam Grant:
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with The TED Audio Collective.
I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
My guest today is Anne Curzan, linguist and beloved English professor at the University of Michigan.
[00:00:42] Anne Curzan:
I think Boggle might've been one of the first signs that I should be a linguist. I had a weird skill with Boggle as a child.
[00:00:49] Adam Grant:
She has a new book, Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words.
It's the most practical and entertaining resource I've encountered to using language. Anne is my favorite word nerd. I invited her on to answer burning questions with fun facts, address language pet peeves, and rethink many of the grammatical rules we all hated in middle school.
Hey Anne.
[00:01:18] Anne Curzan:
Hi Adam. It's great to see you.
[00:01:20] Adam Grant:
You too. It only took about 15 years about my sister raving about you as her favorite professor for us to meet.
[00:01:26] Anne Curzan:
And when I taught your sister, I had no idea the two of you were related because Grant is a common enough last name that I would not know that. And the way I came to know that is an email from your mother.
[00:01:39] Adam Grant:
Oh no. Was she grilling you on grammar rules?
[00:01:44] Anne Curzan:
She had a question about a grammatical construction in one of your books.
[00:01:50] Adam Grant:
You're kidding.
[00:01:51] Anne Curzan:
I am not kidding. So I got an email in 2013. And the subject line was, “Grammar Question from Tracy Grant's mom.” And she was asking me to be the judge on a dispute about a construction in one of your books, which she felt was a glaring grammatical error because you used the phrase even more strikingly as a way to start a sentence, and your mother thought it should be even more striking.
And I was asked to be the referee and in said dispute.
[00:02:25] Adam Grant:
Oh my gosh. I don't think I knew this happened. I would've definitely vetoed it. So what was your verdict?
[00:02:30] Anne Curzan:
My verdict was that You're both right.
[00:02:33] Adam Grant:
Oh, disappointing. Why?
[00:02:36] Anne Curzan:
Because you can use either the adverbial more strikingly or the adjectival more striking as a way to introduce that clause.
But the idea that you can't use the adverbial, the strikingly, it just doesn't hold up because if you didn't have the even more, you actually would need strikingly. You would say, “Strikingly, this finding shows.” You would not say, “Striking. This finding shows.”
[00:03:08] Adam Grant:
So, it sounds like you're saying I was more breast than she was.
[00:03:11] Anne Curzan:
What I would say is that you are more trendy.
[00:03:15] Adam Grant:
Oh, I don't wanna be trendy.
[00:03:17] Anne Curzan:
When I went back and looked at the data, what you see is that the use of more striking as an introductory phrase is older, and then sort of mid to late 20th century, you see this rise in more strikingly, more interestingly, more importantly.
So you're with the trend on that one.
[00:03:36] Adam Grant:
You mean I'm with the trend in terms of not what's cool and hip right now, but rather the way language is evolving.
[00:03:43] Anne Curzan:
That's exactly right. You are with where the language is going.
[00:03:49] Adam Grant:
I realize that a big point of your work is that there isn't always a right answer, but as the son of an English teacher, I really enjoy winning these battles.
Why did you save this exchange from over a decade ago?
[00:04:02] Anne Curzan:
Because I love saving the grammar questions that come in, they may be good fodder for a book someday. And I actually wrote a blog post about this. I did not name you or your mother. I just said an author used this phrase and their mother wrote to me with this concern.
[00:04:25] Adam Grant:
We share, I guess a, a common history, which is you also were raised by a mother who loved language. Talk to me about the early experiences that made you want to become a linguist.
[00:04:37] Anne Curzan:
I did. My mother cared deeply about language. And her care about language manifested in being very strict about more formal usage. So my mother was someone who, when she took her girls to the grocery store, would point out the sign that said 10 items or less, and make sure that her daughters knew that the sign was wrong because it should say 10 items are fewer because the items are accountable.
So she was instilling grammar lessons in us from an early. She had worked as a professional editor at various points in her life, which means that in junior high school and high school, kitchen table, she would be editing my papers. I knew all those little editing conventions because she used them on our essays and I would cry and was all very stressful.
She even corrected one of my sisters during a wedding toast on her grammar.
[00:05:32] Adam Grant:
Really? During the toast?
[00:05:34] Anne Curzan:
During the toast.
[00:05:36] Adam Grant:
Whose wedding?
[00:05:37] Anne Curzan:
So it was my older sister's wedding and my younger sister was giving a toast. And in the toast she used the phrase, “For my husband and I.” And from the back of the room, my mother pipes up, “And me.”
[00:05:52] Adam Grant:
No.
[00:05:52] Anne Curzan:
Yep. It is family lore. It happened.
[00:05:56] Adam Grant:
You were already a linguist at this point. I, I imagine?
[00:05:59] Anne Curzan:
At that point I was a linguist.
[00:06:00] Adam Grant:
And did you jump in and correct her correction?
[00:06:02] Anne Curzan:
I did not. I did not think that that was the moment to have that particular discussion. But the question of when did I discover I wanted to be a linguist was college.
I was interested in language, but I was a really mathy kid and I went to college as a math major. And my sophomore year, I took a course on the history of the English language with a professor named Marie Borroff, and it blew my mind open. She knew the answers to all these questions that I hadn't known were the questions that I really wanted the answers to, but all about double negation being standard in English until the standard variety moved to single negation.
And Colonel spelled with an L, pronounced with an R. Why? You can answer that.
[00:06:51] Adam Grant:
Are you gonna tell me why? Because I've always wondered about that. I pronounce that word colonial for at least half my childhood
[00:06:57] Anne Curzan:
With good reason. English spelling is this fascinating museum about the history of the language, and in this case it's about borrowing in the Renaissance.
So, Shakespeare's time English was borrowing a massive number of words from Latin and French and Greek and Italian, and in this case, we double borrowed. So we borrowed Colonnello from Italian and we borrowed Colonelle from French. They coexisted for a little bit, and then what we managed to do was standardize the Italian spelling with the French pronunciation.
[00:07:35] Adam Grant:
That makes no sense at all, but I get it now.
[00:07:38] Anne Curzan:
I know. And the S in island is a mistake.
[00:07:40] Adam Grant:
Really?
[00:07:41] Anne Curzan:
You can see why I got hooked.
[00:07:43] Adam Grant:
We didn't mean to say islend?
[00:07:45] Anne Curzan:
The word is a Germanic word and it was a compound that meant waterland and by the middle English period was often spelled I-L-A-N-D. Which makes total sense.
[00:07:58] Adam Grant:
Makes sense as it should be.
[00:07:58] Anne Curzan:
Iland. And then in the Renaissance, when there was this interest in classical languages and classical learning. These scholars often went back to the Latin for borrowed words, so you had a word like debt, which we borrowed from French, spelled D-E-T-T-E. And these scholars were like, “Well, but if you go back far enough, it goes back to the Latin debitum.”
So they put the B back into debt. To show its etymology. That's why we have a silent B. So with island, they mistakenly thought it was related to insula, which it's not. And so they put the S quote unquote, back into island even though it was never there.
[00:08:43] Adam Grant:
Is it just too late now? Can't we just change the spelling to fix that mistake?
[00:08:48] Anne Curzan:
What's interesting about spelling is that lots of people wanna reform it. They say, “English spelling is a mess. It doesn't make any sense.” You take a word like Colonel or pneumonia, you name it. But when you suggest reform spelling, people often bulk because they have gotten used to words spelled the way they are.
So if you say, “Okay, let's get rid of the silent ease at the end.” And admire will be spelled A-D-M-I-R and people are like, “No. You will not do that.” So you get changes. For example, donut has been respelled or light as in low calorie food. We've got a new spelling there. You get some spellings. I think though at some point may come to be spelled THO even more formally, but people struggle to actually reform it.
[00:09:44] Adam Grant:
Well, while we're on spelling, it drives me crazy that anytime I write the word extravert and I spell it E-X-T-R-A-V-E-R-T, people try to correct me and they say, “That's not how you spell extrovert. It's E-X-T-R-O vert.” And I've run out of patience to explain to them that in fact, psych in psychology, which you know, as a psychologist, I, I happen to know, um, extravert is spelled with an A and that's the original Jungian spelling.
And so they're actually correcting me incorrectly. Why do they keep doing it?
[00:10:17] Anne Curzan:
I think there, we've got a pronunciation issue where they're in their brains, they've reinterpreted that vowel. In the middle, you've got an, uh, sound, which linguists would call a schwa, which can represent a range of different vowels.
I would guess It has something to do with introvert, with an o.
[00:10:37] Adam Grant:
There's something in psychology that we call feign knowledge, which is when you pretend to know something you don't. Uh, and that combination of arrogance and ignorance eats at me. At my core, I'm like, it's one thing if you wanna correct somebody's spelling, it's another thing if you're gonna do that, but you're the one who's wrong.
And I, I didn't have a term for these people until I read your book.
[00:10:57] Anne Curzan:
It was gifted to me, and I apologize to the listeners who do not like gift as a verb, because I just use it as a verb. The word grammando was introduced to me by Lizzie Skurnick in the little column that, That Should be a Word, in the New York Times Sunday magazine, this was 2012, and she had grammando and defined it as “Someone who constantly corrects other people's grammar.”
And I saw it and I thought. “I really wanted a word for that. That was not grammar police or grammar Nazi.” I don't like using Nazi for talking about things other than actual Nazis. And so here was this playful term for this phenomenon that we know well. And then one of the insights that I came to in writing the book that was really fun was the idea that every single one of us, myself included, has an inner grammando in our head.
I'm trained as a linguist. I love studying language change. I like watching all the things that are happening, the diversity in language. It keeps me in business. This is my job. And yet sometimes there will be a change that I hear in the language and I think. “Really? Does the language have to change that way?” That I still have that response.
I don't like that. And so part of the book is helping us manage that inner grammando that you don't assume your inner grammando is right. It could just be having a moment and people will say, “You know, Anne, why don't you like the word impactful?” And my answer is because, “Aesthetically I don't like it. I have no better reason.”
[00:12:43] Adam Grant:
I hate it too, by the way, and impacted, unless it's the tooth.
[00:12:46] Anne Curzan:
But see, I don't mind the verb, but somehow impactful my inner grammando tackles up about it. But what's funny to me is that I am now letting it through in drafts of writing that are coming from me. So right now I'm the dean of a college and so sometimes there are memos that are drafted that I need to sign and occasionally they will have the word impactful and I'm just think, “Anne you're gonna let it go because there's nothing wrong with that word.”
[00:13:16] Adam Grant:
So is that part of your shift from grammando to wordy?
[00:13:20] Anne Curzan:
I think the wordy, which is defined as a lover of words. We all have one of those in our head too. Clearly you enjoy language and are interested in language. Do you play Wordle or Scrabble or things like that?
[00:13:36] Adam Grant:
I grew up playing Boggle a lot and Scrabble quite a bit, and I play Wordle every day and I probably have six or seven words with friends games going at any given moment, and anagrams Bananagrams, my favorite college game.
[00:13:50] Anne Curzan:
Such a great game. The book is really trying to help your inner wordy and your inner grammando hash it out a little bit more and give both of them more information so that your inner grammando, for example, can know if that rule that you learned in school is actually well justified or is it just a rule that's been passed down generation to generation and your inner wordy can have a few more tools in the toolbox to say, “You know, it's just language change, or that's diversity among dialects.” And the two of them can, can hash it out before you decide to go grammando on someone.
[00:14:26] Adam Grant:
Part of the reason this resonated so strongly for me is that it tracked with the distinction I've often made between thinking like a prosecutor and thinking like a scientist.
[00:14:35] Anne Curzan:
Mmmm.
[00:14:36] Adam Grant:
And it's easy to, to take grammando and overlay that on prosecutor, right?
[00:14:40] Anne Curzan:
Uhhuh.
[00:14:40] Adam Grant:
You're sort of attacking other people for being wrong in the way that they use words.
But the scientist overlap wasn't obvious to me at first until I thought about something Atul Gawande said once. Uh, he said that, “A scientist has an experimental mind, not a litigious one.” And I thought that's what appeals to me about being a wordy, is you're experimenting with language, you're playing with new ways of constructing sentences and and using words, and that's supposed to be fun.
That's part of the joy of language, isn't it?
[00:15:08] Anne Curzan:
That's exactly. And being curious about it as a scientist would. So I love that analogy. And one of the analogies that came to me in writing the book was that of a birder or a bird watcher you hear or you see something new, and to be curious about it to say, “Where does that come from? How does it work? Where does it live? What happens to it in the winter?”
As opposed to, “There's this new construction, let's kill it.” Which I think is often people's first response to new language that kids are using and they say, “That is awful. That is ruining the language. Make it stop.” Sometimes they say, “Anne, make it stop.” As if I have the power to do that.
[00:15:51] Adam Grant:
There's a part of me that says, “I just want people to stop being grammandos and start being wordies.” But there's also a part of me that says, “No.” As you pointed out, some rules exist for a good reason. This goes to the difference between misuse and pet peeves. So I, I have one I wanna run by you.
[00:16:11] Anne Curzan:
Okay.
[00:16:11] Adam Grant:
Probably the thing that bothers me the most in everyday speech and writing is when people say that they're humbled by an achievement, an award, or some kind of recognition they've gotten.
Uh, if you look up what it means to be humbled in the dictionary, that's not a display of humility. When you say, “I'm humbled.” My reading of it is that you're being lowered in importance. I wanna be able to say that the Ohio State Buckeyes are full of themselves and our wolverines are going to humble them.
[00:16:41] Anne Curzan:
How would you feel if the person said, “It makes me feel humble.”
[00:16:48] Adam Grant:
Much better because they're describing the feeling as opposed to the act of being defeated or destroyed.
[00:16:55] Anne Curzan:
You said, “I go and I look it up in a dictionary, and that's not what the verb to humble means.” And I would say, if enough people start to use, I am humbled to receive this award, to mean I am honored and it makes me feel humble, then that is what humbled comes to mean.
And what's interesting about hanging out with dictionary editors, which I do another fun part of my profession, they will say, “Look, we're just trying to keep up with all of you.” People go to the dictionary for quote unquote the answer or the correct way to use the word. And the dictionary editors are tracking us in our writing now in our speech to look at the ways in which words are being used and how they're changing over time.
And they will always be behind us. So they'll be tracking this, and then if they say, “Okay, this new meaning is gonna stick, then it will come into dictionaries.” So I would say. Probably not to correct because I think at this point so many people use it this way, and I think that both of us know what they mean.
Would you agree with that?
[00:18:10] Adam Grant:
I was afraid you were gonna say that Anne. I almost didn't ask you the question 'cause I didn't wanna hear your answer. Your reasoning makes a lot of sense to me. Here's what, here's what I have a hard time with.
[00:18:19] Anne Curzan:
Mm-Hmm.
[00:18:19] Adam Grant:
What I love about the idea of humbling is it's the idea that I can actually give someone humility who's lacking.
[00:18:19] Anne Curzan:
Mm-Hmm.
[00:18:46] Adam Grant:
The literal meaning of it. Right? I can humble you if you're a narcissist. Uh, I'm, I'm doing the people around you a service, by the way, by doing that and to not use the word humble to, to inject some humility into you. Just feels like it's a literal loss and if people start. I would say misusing, but you're saying evolving the usage of the verb, then my usage of it starts to lose its meaning.
Or we start to have these two meanings and one sounds like the opposite of the other, which is very confusing. So how do you reconcile those? Do I just have to abandon the way that I wanna think about it the way it's been used historically?
[00:19:07] Anne Curzan:
Not necessarily. So you have rightly outlined two possible paths.
One is that these two meanings coexist, at least for a while. And yes, it is true that they might mean quite different. Perhaps even opposite things, but this would not be the first word that means it's opposite. So sanction, which means to punish, but also to allow.
[00:19:33] Adam Grant:
I hate that one by the way.
[00:19:34] Anne Curzan:
Or here's one you might not have thought of to dust.
Because dust can be to remove the particles or dust from, but you can also, for example, dust a cake with sugar, which means that you're putting all of those particles on it.
[00:19:48] Adam Grant:
That one at least has a modifier that makes it clear. The sanctions one has always just been a mistake. Sounds like a punishment. We don't need the other meaning,
[00:19:57] Anne Curzan:
And one that's happening all around us right now is peruse.
What does peruse mean to you?
[00:20:03] Adam Grant:
To browse.
[00:20:04] Anne Curzan:
If you look in most standard dictionaries, the first meaning is to pour over to read carefully.
[00:20:10] Adam Grant:
Really? I think about it as ca a casual glance.
[00:20:12] Anne Curzan:
Right? And so in American Heritage, which is the dictionary where, for which I was on the usage panel, I think it's the second meaning where it says, “Usage problem to skim or scan.”
When you poll people, most of us use peruse to mean skim or scan. One of the rich things about English is how many synonyms we have, and we will come up with other ways to say the thing we're trying to say. So as unique comes more and more often to mean highly unusual as opposed to specifically one of a kind.
We will have to say one of a kind when we mean one of a kind. I think for me, one of the things about being a historian of the English language is that I study how English came to be the way it is, and I also study the history of people's concerns about English becoming the way it is, and it means that I have this enormous collection of quotes of people about how awful it is that decimate no longer means to kill one in every 10.
What a loss for the language. That was such a specific useful meaning for when we need to talk about killing one in every 10.
[00:21:25] Adam Grant:
There's always one New York Times reader who writes to me and says, “Children are reared, not raised.” I'm like reared? First of all, a rear is a behind. Second of all, I, I have not heard that verb, and at least, you know, three decades.
[00:21:39] Anne Curzan:
Right. And nauseous should only mean causing nausea. That's another one that I sometimes get that you can say, “The rollercoaster is nauseous, but not that Anne is nauseous.” And I think you've already lost that one.
[00:21:52] Adam Grant:
Completely. One of the things I really enjoyed in reading your book is that you changed my mind on a bunch of things you already mentioned unique, that you to bother me and you went through the reasoning and, and I thought, “Okay, that's sound logic. People are using it as as novel. Uh, distinctive and so something can be more unique.”
You definitely changed my mind on funner, which I always thought just sounded silly, but you made it pretty fun.
[00:22:16] Anne Curzan:
Oh, I'm glad. And certainly it was irreverent of me as an English professor to put it in the title
[00:22:21] Adam Grant:
I, I still have this voice in my head saying, “Yeah, there isn't one right way to use language, but they're definitely wrong.”
[00:22:29] Anne Curzan:
You know, my inner grammando has some very strong feelings about things, and what I have learned to do is keep most of those in my head. So I, I tell a story in the book about being at business school talks with a colleague who used the verb double click as the way that he transitioned between slides.
That for him, it meant to dig deeper or delve deeper into something. And my inner grammando just really was upset about this and thought, “This is so business school jargony. I can't believe that I have to sit here and listen to this.” And then I went home and for whatever reason, 'cause usually I keep my inner grammando pretty well contained in my head.
I was telling my partner over dinner about this ridiculous business school jargon. And he looked at me and said, “I actually think it's quite clever.” And he was totally right. He was totally right. That's a great metaphor. It's playful.
[00:23:30] Adam Grant:
I like it as a metaphor. I'm glad you've come around.
[00:23:32] Anne Curzan:
Exactly. I don't use it yet, but now I can delight in it.
[00:23:36] Adam Grant:
I, I'm sensing a little bit of a contradiction between your, your words and your affect. 'Cause the look on your face is not delighted. When you say double click.
[00:23:46] Anne Curzan:
That's 'cause I can't say it yet. I can only delight in it when I hear it in my environment. This is one of your options when you decide there's a change in the language, new usage, something where you think, “I just don't like that.” You can opt out, but to recognize that the decision to opt out is different from, “I'm gonna correct this in other people.”
That, particularly for those of us who are English professors and the like, is to be really careful that you know what you're doing and are being helpful when you choose to correct other people.
[00:24:21] Adam Grant:
There are a lot of editors who are probably a little bit upset with you.
[00:24:24] Anne Curzan:
It is challenging some of what people think they know about what is correct, and it's interesting to see every time, for example, Merriam-Webster puts out an announcement that it's okay to end a sentence with a preposition, and it's been okay to end a sentence with a preposition as long as we have been able to do that, which is centuries, it makes headlines and it's clear that it forces people to rethink something that they learned and that that knowledge is precious, but in fact it often allows you to create a less stilted sentence.
You can end a sentence with a preposition. I love having conversations with editors because we share so much common ground, which is that we all care deeply about language. I care just as much about the Oxford comma as they do.
I notice the who's and the whom's and whether it is historically accurate. It's what we choose to do. With that noticing, we get to have the conversation about is it really helping us be effective writers if we stick with that rule, and let me show you whether that rule, where it came from, how well justified it is, and then we can have a really interesting conversation about whether it's worth keeping.
[00:25:45] Adam Grant:
Let's go to a lightning ground. First question, what is the worst language advice you've ever gotten?
[00:25:52] Anne Curzan:
Never use an adverb. It's a terrible piece of advice.
[00:25:56] Adam Grant:
Why?
[00:25:56] Anne Curzan:
Because adverbs can be very expressive. I think it is worth saying to people, you might wanna check some of those adverbs such as very, really, extremely, and see if you actually need them, because much of the time in writing you don't.
That if it's important, you can just say it's important and you don't have to say it's extremely important.
[00:26:20] Adam Grant:
What is a word or construction that you've rethought your opinion on recently?
[00:26:27] Anne Curzan:
What a couple of means. This is one that I actually was so sure that I was right, that I enforced, and then a student as a class project, because I have them look into rules, decided to look into this rule about what does a couple of mean.
And if you look in most standard dictionaries, it says one meaning is two, and another meaning is several.
[00:26:54] Adam Grant:
No.
[00:26:55] Anne Curzan:
I know.
[00:26:55] Adam Grant:
That's why we have several and a few.
[00:26:59] Anne Curzan:
I would even self-correct that I would be writing an email and I would say I have a couple of questions and that I would list my questions and realize that I had three.
And so I would go back and I would say, I have several questions, and now I don't do that anymore.
[00:27:13] Adam Grant:
Wow. Uh, you're, you're much quicker to abandon some of your language passions and predilections than I am, but let me give you a chance to defend one of those.
[00:27:23] Anne Curzan:
Okay.
[00:27:23] Adam Grant:
Uh, what's a hot take or an unpopular opinion you have on language?
[00:27:27] Anne Curzan:
I think the construction that elicits the most comments, whether I write about it or I talk about it on the radio, is singular they. It is such a hot button topic. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to talk about it because we need to move the argument away from, can it be singular?
'Cause I used to get in these arguments where people would say, “It can't be singular.” And I would say, “But it is.” And they would say, “But it can't be.” And I would say, “But it is.” It's not actually arguable because the data show that as speakers we use, they as a singular. If we take a sentence such as someone who knows where they're going, should give us directions, most people don't even notice it.
It's such a standard part of the grammar. So it can be singular.
[00:28:17] Adam Grant:
It would be so much simpler if we just didn't have gendered pronouns at all in English.
[00:28:22] Anne Curzan:
And of course there are languages that work that way.
[00:28:25] Adam Grant:
You have a, a fun assignment in your classes that your students teach you slang words.
[00:28:30] Anne Curzan:
Oh.
[00:28:25] Adam Grant:
What are your favorite ones you've learned lately?
[00:28:31] Anne Curzan:
So this winter, they taught me for the plot. Do you know this, Adam?
[00:28:40] Adam Grant:
No.
[00:28:41] Anne Curzan:
This is part of the language that young people are using as they narrate their lives, which I think is certainly related to video games and social media. As in whatever happens, it's gonna make the plot of my life interesting. They say, you can also use it when something bad has happened, and you can say, “I really wish that hadn't happened, but for the plot, it's part of a life story.”
So I like that. And then they also taught me to drop the lore or unlock the lore. And this.
[00:29:17] Adam Grant:
What?
[00:29:13] Anne Curzan:
I love that lore is now a slang word. I mean, this is slang taking words and just so playfully putting them to other uses. So my students tell me that dropping or unlocking the lore is to tell the backstory.
[00:29:28] Adam Grant:
Wow. It, it, it seems like there's a thread of conspiracy theory behind both of these. Somebody is orchestrating something and we have to have narrative cohesion here.
[00:29:39] Anne Curzan:
It's such a fun experience in class to have students tell me about what's happening in the language and for example, almost everything I know about texting rules.
Such as a period at the end of a text is serious, potentially angry. I learned that from undergraduates.
[00:29:55] Adam Grant:
Me too.
[00:29:56] Anne Curzan:
Right? It's the privilege of hanging out with undergraduates is that they have taught me how texting works. They have repurposed punctuation to do the work of facial expression and tone. It is a system and they are very careful about it, and they will, for example, describe getting a text.
Let's imagine from someone who you're interested in and the close reading that they do of that text, right? It's two exclamation marks, not three. What do you think that means?
[00:30:27] Adam Grant:
This is definitely your next book.
[00:30:30] Anne Curzan:
The problem with that book, Adam, is that it would be outta date before I even finished drafting it.
[00:30:36] Adam Grant:
Of course it would. I'm just thinking about all the things I've learned from teaching undergrads. I used to have ellipses at the end of my emails and I thought, you know, typing dot dot dot meant to be continued.
They were like, “No, that's ominous.” Right. “I'm in big trouble.” And then, yeah, the exclamation point thing that you needed at least three exclamation points to seem genuinely enthusiastic.
[00:30:57] Anne Curzan:
What we get to do is I say, “Okay, you teach me about texting and then I can help you make sure that you control the conventions of standard academic punctuation.” And it suddenly lifts the burden of being told. “If you don't know how to use academic punctuation, then you are not smart or you're not educated, is to say, these are different systems. It's a game, so let's learn the rules of the academic game and you teach me the rules of the texting game, which I'm still struggling with.”
And suddenly it is fun again as opposed to stressful or something that makes students feel insecure that they should know this and somehow they don't.
[00:31:41] Adam Grant:
What is a prediction you have for the future of language?
[00:31:44] Anne Curzan:
First of all, I know that almost anything I predict will be wrong, I think whom eventually will get to die.
[00:31:51] Adam Grant:
Yeah, good riddance.
[00:31:53] Anne Curzan:
It's been trying to die.
[00:31:54] Adam Grant:
So stilted and formal.
[00:31:55] Anne Curzan:
It's been trying to die for several centuries and we should just let it die.
The thing, I don't know what to do with is the internet and the ways in which language can now spread around the world in seconds. And as a linguist, it's fascinating and it's exciting, but we're just not sure other than it's gonna create a lot of language contact. Both in written language and speaking, but exactly what it means for how languages are gonna change and how quickly.
I think we just don't, we don't have the data yet.
[00:32:30] Adam Grant:
Okay. One other, this is from Tracy. I texted my sister to find out if she had a question. She wants to know if you think I or me will disappear.
[00:32:39] Anne Curzan:
Such a good question. It already has collapsed in some varieties of English. So there are varieties of English that for example, only use me both as the subject and as the object.
And I know that that can feel catastrophic to some people. They think if we lose that distinction, that really is the end of English and I was with you until the collapse of I and me, and now all your credibility is gone. To that, I would say it has already happened in standardized English with the pronoun you.
So we used to have a subject object distinction, which was that ye was the subject pronoun and you was the object pronoun. And over time that collapsed. And no one told me when I was reading Shakespeare that if you track his yes and his yous, he cannot keep them straight. He uses ye as both a subject and an object, and you is both a subject and an object.
And now ye has died. You can do both and the language is fine. If you were to take the long, long view subject object distinctions are collapsing, this is why whom is also gonna die. But I think Tracy's question is great because I don't know if it's going to be I or me.
[00:33:57] Adam Grant:
Hmm. What's the question you have for me?
[00:34:00] Anne Curzan:
You ask great questions and so I am wondering, as you prepare for an interview or a podcast, how do you think about what's gonna be a good question?
[00:34:12] Adam Grant:
Huh. Well, thank you. I'll try to live up to that compliment. I feel very humbled right now.
[00:34:18] Anne Curzan:
Well played.
[00:34:19] Adam Grant:
No, I don't, I don't, I don't feel humbled. I, I just start with personal curiosity.
[00:34:23] Anne Curzan:
Mm-Hmm.
[00:34:24] Adam Grant:
So I was, I was reading your book. There were lots of places where I had notes, but I find that personal curiosity is a really easy way to get sucked into a rabbit hole that will interest exactly two people, the guest and me, and completely lose the audience. And so.
[00:34:41] Anne Curzan:
Mm-hmm.
[00:34:42] Adam Grant:
The filter I apply is not, “Did I find this interesting, but did I find it interesting enough to share with somebody else?”
Like was there, was there someone I couldn't wait to text or call or email or tell about this thing and that is worthy of a question.
[00:34:57] Anne Curzan:
Oh, I love that.
[00:34:59] Adam Grant:
I love your insights about words and language, but I also love the attitude and spirit that you bring to them. And for as long as I've been teaching, when students ask for course advice, I always say, “Choose based on the teacher, not the topic.”
Because a great teacher will make anything interesting. And I never took a linguistics class, but I think it's safe to say that if I'd had you as a professor, I would've been very tempted to become a linguist. I think you've modeled what it means to to rethink our assumptions and open our minds in such a beautiful way in your book and in the way we communicate.
[00:35:32] Anne Curzan:
I would say I'm humbled by that, Adam, but I know that if I say that, I'm gonna annoy you. So thank you. That means a lot, and it is such a pleasure to finally get to meet you and talk with you
[00:35:46] Adam Grant:
Right back at you.
Well, Anne made a strong case that we need to stop judging intelligence from grammar. Even Shakespeare made grammatical errors. My broader reflection is that Anne opened my eyes to a new domain of rethinking. As I've explored the value of rethinking our ideas and opinions, I've overlooked the importance of rethinking how we express them.
The meaning of words isn't fixed. It evolves. The faster we adapt, the more degrees of freedom we gain to communicate. Clearly.
ReThinking is hosted by me. Adam Grant. This show is part of The TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley-Ma and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown.
Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winik, Samiah Adams, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rodgers.
When you said that you liked data as singular, this is such a problem for me as a, as a social scientist. One data point is an anecdote. What's wrong with a datum?
[00:37:07] Anne Curzan:
There's nothing wrong except that American English speakers seem to have decided that that was not how they were gonna do the singular of that, that it was going to be data points.
[00:37:19] Adam Grant:
Yeah, that's fair. I know I'm fighting a losing battle here.