My mom would have hated this book; I loved it. My dad, as a psychiatrist, would have had some thoughts about this family disagreement — but he would have kept quiet about it. (Apparently that’s the role of a Jewish father.) Since we all know that you can tell a book by its cover, let’s analyze the cover in order to understand what’s going on here.

• The title — Says who? — tells you that it’s probably a book about quotations. Maybe it will let us know that something attributed to Mark Twain or Yogi Berra is actually from Richard Nixon.
• But no, it’s not about quotations. The subtitle makes it clear that it’s actually a linguistics popularization: A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words [capitalization preserved].
• The author, Anne Curzan, has a PhD; saying that might ordinarily seem like an affectation, but it’s necessary in a popularization since it shows that she is an authority, not just a random person who cares about words.

Perhaps Curzan’s name rings a bell. It will if you listen every Saturday to the brief but delightful radio show/podcast that she co-hosts with Rebecca Kruth, That’s What They Say, as I do.

Says Who? is not your typical usage guide, as you can surmise from the description I quoted above. The title and the word “funner” in the subtitle give that away. There are 33 very short chapters (plus an intro, an epilogue, acknowledgements, and notes, all of which are worth reading). The tone is always calm, and seasoned with humor throughout. Every chapter is organized in the same way, so you can feel comfortable as you move from one to the next. There is no hectoring à la Strunk and White. If you’re interested in nerdy details, you can certainly find them (for example, it’s The New York Times but the Los Angeles Times — note the capitalization). If you’re a prescriptivist, as both of my parents were, you’ll be irritated to find that it’s perfectly all right to end a sentence with a preposition and to split an infinitive (and it always has been, as long as you’re writing in English, not Latin), that there’s nothing wrong with the word hopefully, that singular they is just fine (and always has been), and so forth. In other words, you will learn some linguistics, not fictional rules. And maybe you can see the virtues of being a descriptivist — even if you are or were an English teacher! (Curzan is a professor of English at U. Michigan.)

I originally thought of writing this post in a different way, dividing it into 33 parts, each of which deliberately but subtly violated one of the made-up rules such as the ones debunked above (one per chapter). Curzan’s use of funner in the subtitle is a good example of that, but I quickly decided that 33 such violations — especially if they were supposed to be subtle — would just be overwhelming. Just read and enjoy the book; it’s whelming enough.

Categories: Books, Linguistics