Excerpt from Says Who? by Anne Curzan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

There's another new word—wordie—that captures the alternative to being a grammando. Added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2018, wordie describes someone who delights in language's shifting landscape. Wordies know the language rules and where they come from, and then they make informed calls about whether or not to follow the rule in a given context. Wordies are the skilled bird-watchers of language, taking pleasure in observing how different speakers creatively deploy the language and how language is changing.

Given that you've chosen to read a usage book with the word funner in the title, you almost certainly have an inner wordie who lives alongside your inner grammando. Welcome to my world! When I notice a new species in the language out in the wild (metaphorically speaking) and have an urge to stamp it out—that's my inner grammando talking. When I delight in learning from young people about the rules of texting and new slang, my inner wordie has the upper hand.

We all have our language peeves—those bits of language that grate on our nerves and that make us want to pull out a red pen while reading or stop someone midsentence to go grammando on them. (Yes, them—see chapter 18 for an explanation of how they can be singular.) And the question at any one of these peevey moments is whether to let our inner grammando say anything or let our inner wordie carry the day. This book will help you sort out when your inner grammando might have useful guidance and when your inner wordie should override concerns that something's "wrong." Believe me, I have had lots of practice.

My mother was a grammando when I was growing up. I was taught to say "This is she speaking" on the phone when someone called for me, and it was certainly "He is shorter than I," not "He is shorter than me." You are well, not good, and you drive slowly, not slow. I spent many an evening at the kitchen table nervously watching my mother, a trained editor, poring over my school papers and marking up grammatical missteps. I am to this day a meticulous copy editor, noticing every comma and inconsistency in usage.

As my sisters and I got older, this attention to grammar became more endearing than frightening, and one of our favorite family stories involves a moment when my mother's inner grammando got the better of her at, of all places, a wedding. My older sister's wedding, in fact. It was the rehearsal dinner, and, in the middle of her toast, my younger sister let slip out of her mouth the phrase "for my husband and I." From the back of the room, my mother interjected, "And me!"

We all laughed, and I've gotten a lot of mileage out of this story in my career as a linguist. But this kind of public grammar policing can be cringeworthy. And silencing. Think about a moment when you had your language corrected in front of other people and how that felt. Or even a moment when someone pointed out something about your language such that you became self-conscious about it. In my second year of graduate school, I was studying regional variation in American dialects, and I learned about what linguists call "positive anymore": the use of anymore in a positive declarative to mean 'nowadays.' As an East Coaster, I don't do this; I use anymore only in a negative declarative such as "I don't eat red meat anymore." Shortly after reading about this largely Midwestern construction, I was talking to a triathlete friend about how he could find everything he needed at the local superstore, and he said, "They sell energy bars there anymore."

I perked right up and exclaimed, "You're a positive anymore speaker!"

He looked like a deer caught in the headlights, suddenly unsure how to continue talking with a person who seemed to be listening more to his word choice than to what he was saying. Despite my obvious enthusiasm for how he spoke, the conversation ended quickly and awkwardly.

Excerpted from Says Who? by Anne Curzan. Copyright © 2024 by Anne Curzan. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.