10/21/2024
Does "irregardless" make you cringe? Do you worry that no one knows how to use the apostrophe anymore? If so, this lively session on language is for you. As a historian of the English language, a linguist, and an English professor, Anne Curzan explains changes happening in spoken and written English and whether we need to worry. You’ll leave with a heightened awareness of changes afoot in the English language and tools for becoming an even more skilled speaker and writer.
Sponsored by the Hope College Arts and Humanities, the Big Read, College Writing, Education, English, First Year Seminar, Phelps Scholars, and Social Sciences Departments and Programs.
Professor Curzan is an expert on the history of the English language, and in addition to studying how the language itself has changed over the past 1500 years, she explores how attitudes about words and grammar have shifted. She describes herself as a fount of random linguistic information about the English language, which she enjoys sharing online and on the radio. Professor Curzan can be found talking about language on the weekly show “That’s What They Say” on local NPR station Michigan Public; she also wrote biweekly (in the every two weeks sense!) for six years for the blog Lingua Franca on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website. Her TED talk “What makes a word ‘real’?” has more than 2.1 million views on the national TED talk site.
