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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Let's end the show with some language fun with Anne Curzan, a professor of English language and literature, linguistics, and education at the University of Michigan. She has a new book just out today called Says Who?: A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words. Yes, she wrote funner and will explain why that sounds wrong and who decides these things anyway. Welcome, Professor Curzan. Welcome to WNYC. Thanks for joining us.

Anne Curzan: Oh, Brian, I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get to funner and open up the phones for listener participation here, let's talk about your overall approach to what's right and wrong with language usage. Instead of telling us what's right and wrong, like no double negatives, no irregardless, no ain't, you describe what you call a struggle between grammandos and wordies. Explain who those two groups are.

Anne Curzan: Sure. The word grammando, which I think is a great one. I want to credit Lizzie Skurnick who publicized this word in the New York Times Magazine in the section That Should Be a Word. It's used to describe someone who is constantly correcting other people's grammar. In writing the book, I came to realize that I think every single one of us has a little inner grammando in our head. That inner grammando may have a really big loud microphone or a smaller microphone, but it's there, and when we hear new bits of language or unfamiliar language that surprises us, that inner grammando may perk up and say, "What's that? I don't like that."

In the book, I'm encouraging us to have some conversations with our inner grammando about whether that's the right response because we also have in our head an inner wordy. Humans enjoy language. I don't know how many of our listeners enjoy playing Wordle in the morning or Spelling Bee, or maybe they like to pun, play Scrabble. We enjoy language, we're curious about language, and I think sometimes the way that we have learned grammar in school can take the fun out of it.

What I'm trying to do is bring the fun back in, give people more information so that our wordie and our grammando can have these conversations about, "Is that a useful rule?" "Says who? Who said that's a rule?" "Do I need to follow it in speech and writing?" It makes us really savvy speakers and writers when we can have those conversations.

Brian Lehrer: That's the title of the book, Says Who, by University of Michigan Professor Anne Curzan. Listeners, are you more a grammando or a wordie? Do you have a pet peeve with language usage? Does more unique drive you bonkers? Irregardless, anyone do these literally-- people hate literally, make you cranky? Hopefully, another one, my guest Anne Curzan, can shed some light on what's going on with the way we use and police language. Call or text us at 212-433-WNYC you grammandos and you wordies, 212-433-9692. Again, you can call or text with a question, pet peeve, the best sentence you ever wrote, whatever.

I guess the grammando in somebody might bark at funner in the title of the book. The subtitle, A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words. I'm sure you intended that, but why?

Anne Curzan: I did. I put it in the title for a couple of reasons. One is to suggest that this book, while it's a usage guide, might be a little bit irreverent about some of those rules that we learned. Second, I knew that some people would pick it up with funner in the title and say, "What is going on here? Who is this English professor who would ever put funner in the title of a usage guide?"

There's a really good story behind this word. I study the history of the English language, which means I get to look at how words change over time and how our attitudes about them change over time. Fun for much of its life in English was a noun. That means if we said that party was fun, fun was functioning there like the noun chaos, that party was chaos but when kids heard that, you can imagine how they might reinterpret that as an adjective. That party was boring. That party was great. That party was fun.

In the 20th century, we started to see that adjective use come in. Kids reinterpreted it. Interestingly, in the 20th century, there were usage guides that were very cranky about fun as an adjective. They said you should just not use that as an adjective. You shouldn't say a fun party. We've gotten over that, so now we allow fun to be an adjective. What we're seeing now is that kids are trying to make fun as an adjective behave like other one-syllable adjectives. If we think about tall, taller, tallest, wide, wider, widest, you can see where I'm going.

Brian Lehrer: Fun, funner, funnest.

Anne Curzan: Fun, funner, funniest. That's what kids will do because they figure out the pattern. Then some adult authority figure says, "Don't say that. Funner is terrible." The kid then stores that away as an exception. I think what may happen here is that many adults don't have quite as strong a reaction to funnest as they do to funner. Funnest has shown up in some advertising campaigns in a playful way. I would guess, I may not live long enough to see it, that funnest will come in first into standard usage, and then funner will scoot in on its coattails.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get off fun, funner, funnest, is there a reason that the superlative, the funnest, would sound more acceptable to people earlier than funner?

Anne Curzan: It's a great question. I don't know the answer. One possibility is that the people have gone more grammando on funner, and funnest has not been as affected. It doesn't come up as the example as often, but that's just a guess on why funnest doesn't sound as wrong to people.

Brian Lehrer: Well, this is definitely the funnest segment we've done on the show today. If you're ready to talk to another English teacher, here's Anthony in Nutley, New Jersey. You're on WNYC. Hi, Anthony.

Anthony: Yes. Hi, Brian and Ms. Curzan. Love the show. This is very interesting. I can't wait to see the book. I'm an English teacher. I teach English as a second language. I've been doing it for over 20 years. I really have to impress upon my students the difference between the grammando and the wordies because English with its hybrid vigor, I don't know nothing. The sound of that is a much stronger expression than I don't know anything. Nouns used as adjectives, flower, shop, et cetera.

My peeve with English, and I've gotten these all off the radio, I'm not going to read them to you, but it's no agreement between subject and verb. This is a very, very common error, and I hear it all the time on classy radio stations like yourself, [chuckles] not on your show though.

Brian Lehrer: What's an example? What do you mean, no agreement between-- Do you have one that jumps out at you?

Anthony: Oh, I have a couple. One of the claims that were decided. Every one of the parking garages have to undergo inspection. A steady stream of tourists walk up to the gate. One of my favorite choreographers are.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Anthony, I'm going to leave it there. Those are all examples of the singular or the plural conjugation of the verb, right, Anne?

Anne Curzan: Yes, they are. It is true that when we're processing in real-time, we will sometimes have a verb that might agree with the noun that is closest to it, which I heard in some of the examples that we just got, one of the claims were, where technically the verb agrees with one but claims is sitting right next to it, which can catch us. We're trying to do a lot of work when we're speaking on the fly.

It's also true that some of this territory is tricky. You can take some nouns like the jury, and it depends whether you're an American English speaker or a British English speaker as to whether that takes a singular verb or a plural verb. There are also pronouns that can take both. If we think about an expression such as, either cake or cookies is fine, are fine. are we talking about the cake or the cookies? One of the rules you'll see in usage guides is a proximity rule, which is go with the noun closest, so either the cake or cookies are, but either the cookies or the cake is. Depends on the order of the nouns.

Brian Lehrer: If you say either one, then it is. Either one is fine.

Anne Curzan: Yes. I understand the concern when we hear something we say, "Oh, I don't think that's right." One thing is to recognize that, speaking in real-time, we will sometimes get caught on a more complicated grammatical construction. The other is that some of these constructions where you have a singular pronoun one either each and followed by a plural noun, those are tricky, and sometimes usage guides don't totally agree about what is "correct."

Brian Lehrer: Mike in San Francisco is calling as a self-identified grammando. Mike, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Mike: Hi. How's it going? Yes. As I was telling your screener, I'm a real grammando, and every time I hear these two phrases, I just went inside. I don't say anything, but it really bugged me. I've gotten my kids in the habit, so they know not to do these things. One is nauseous. I hear it used out of context all the time when it should be nauseated. That cake made me nauseous. That cake made me nauseated. The cake itself is nauseous. You get it. [laughs] That's one thing. The other one is when people say, "Before she died, she told me." Or, "Before she died, she did this." I'm like, "Well, duh." It's unnecessary. Those are my two little pet peeves and I'll sign off.

Brian Lehrer: Because she's obviously alive if she did it. Okay. Thank you very much. Just go on. You want to comment on those, or I could just go on to another one, but go ahead, Anne.

Anne Curzan: I'll do a quick comment about nauseous and nauseated. I'm afraid that you're probably going to lose this one. At this point, for many of us, nauseous means nauseated. We can say, "I feel nauseous." You'll find it all over edited prose. My partner who's a medical doctor, still continues to use nauseated in that context and feels very strongly about it, but I have told him that he's going to lose. The rest of us who have changed the meaning of that word will win.

One note here is that I think often change in word meaning, historically seems really interesting to us. People will say to me, "You mean nice used to mean silly and lollygag meant fool around in the kissing sense. That's so interesting." Then when the change is happening all around us, as with nauseous, it can feel more worrisome.

Brian Lehrer: Sarah in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Sarah.

Sarah: Hi. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you.

Sarah: Okay. Great. I'm definitely a grammando. My husband gets so angry at me about it all the time. I should keep my mouth shut more often, but I can't stand two things. The word impactful, because I think it was made up. I don't think it's an actual word. When people use the word myself incorrectly, and instead, they should just say me, but it's as if they're seeing myself because they think it sounds smarter. Those are my two things.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. How about impactful? That's a classic.

Anne Curzan: What I love about impactful is that it is also one of my peeves. I'm honest about the fact that I'm trained as a linguist, I study the history of the language, but I still have an inner grammando. I managed to keep it pretty quiet much of the time, but grammando does not like the word impactful. Somehow I find it aesthetically displeasing, but I have no good grounds for this. The word impactful is completely well-formed. It's just like meaningful or hopeful.

Brian Lehrer: Full of impact.

Anne Curzan: Full of impact. It's relatively new, which is why many of us are noticing it, but I can feel myself starting to get over it. I find myself saying things like, "That change is going to be very--," and I realize I'm headed straight to word impactful. I often take a right turn and say significant, but I'm clearly getting over it.

Brian Lehrer: What's another one of yours?

Anne Curzan: Of my peeves?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Anne Curzan: I found myself a few months ago getting cranky about what I consider to be a business jargon term, which is double-click. I have colleagues here at the business school who use this as a verb to mean to dig deeper into or dive into. I was in presentations where someone would have a slide with, for example, three points on it, and then they would say, "Let's double-click on that first one." That was the way they would transition to the next slide. I thought, "Oh, that is so jargony. I can't believe this." I went home, again, I usually don't share these but somehow over dinner, I was sharing with my partner, this whole peeve about double-click and he just looked at me and said, "I actually think it's quite clever."

[chuckles]

The nice thing was that then my inner wordie could speak up and say, "Of course it is." It's actually playful and rather delightful. I don't use double-click yet, and I would want to say to listeners, you always have the option of opting out. You can decide you don't like impactful and decide not to use it, but that's different from correcting other people on it. I think a lot about that as an English professor who is working with students on their writing.

Brian Lehrer: Double-click is so Windows-centric. I use an iPad, all I have to do is touch a screen. We've gotten calls from a number of grammandos and I'll say most of the people calling in are identifying themselves as grammandos and they really want to talk about the words or phrases that drive them crazy, but we have one person calling. Nick from Brooklyn who is identifying as a wordie. Nick, you're on WNYC. Go for it.

Nick: Great. Yes, I'm definitely more of a wordie than a grammando. I tend to get bothered by things that are correct that I feel should be incorrect. One of those things was a running argument I used to have with my father-in-law, about when you would compare yourself to somebody else or something else. For instance, if I were to say, he is smarter than I. That is the correct way to say it, because smarter than I am. I always thought that was ridiculously awkward. It should be smarter than me because we're talking about someone else and me. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Get that, Anne.

Anne Curzan: I love that example because part of what we're hearing here is that, exactly Nick, as some of the things that we've learned are correct at this point, don't sound right. I think about many contexts in which for example, whom, which is really trying to die, [chuckles] if we would just let it die, but whom can sound too formal, it can sound stuffy. While technically, it might be the grammatically "correct" choice, and I'm using scare quotes around correct, in context, whom may not feel right.

I grew up with a mother who made us answer the phone, "This is she speaking?" I was taught, he's taller than I, but we also know that in other languages, you would say for example, it's me, c'est moi in French, and it is fine to say that in English. You don't need to say, it is I, you can say, it's me.

Brian Lehrer: We've got 45 seconds left in the show. Listener texts, "Just sit back, relax, and watch the language change with the culture. It's way more fun than fighting it." They use the word culture, and the thing we haven't talked about yet is cultural differences within American English, Black English, whatever you want to call it, where it can be, I don't know, at worst, racist, at least, in your own bubble to pass judgment on certain things.

Anne Curzan: I think a really important thing to remember here is that diversity and language, is part of the diversity of us, and that we're a diverse culture, and we're going to see a lot of diversity in language. All varieties of English are systematic. One of them got standardized, all the rest are systematic, and language is a key part of who we are and who our communities are. That's why I'm hoping people can enjoy language more and take a more inclusive kinder approach to it.

Brian Lehrer: Anne Curzan's book is called Says Who?: A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words. Thanks so much. This was funner than anything else we did today.

Anne Curzan: [laughs] Thank you, Brian.

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