Grammar Girl’s Interview with Neal Whitman (Full Transcript)
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and today you’ll hear me talk with Neal Whitman about the most interesting language stories that caught our eye in the news. We talked about a new study that showed how people who speak certain kinds of languages have a better memory, how having a word for both light blue and dark blue can help people pick out colors faster, and how language programs around the country are being cut. Plus, at the end, we shared the origin stories of Squiggly, Aardvark, and Fenster—the characters you always hear about in our example sentences. I hope you enjoy it!
But first, I have a contest to tell you about. Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network, and to celebrate the network reaching the 300 million download milestone, you can enter to win a one-on-one web call with me. It’s a long URL, so I’ll just put it in the show notes, but it’s also the pinned tweet right now at the Quick and Dirty Tips Twitter account, which is just @quickdirtytips. And now, on to the show.
MIGNON: Hi, Neal. It’s great to be here with you today.
NEAL: I’m happy to be here.
MIGNON: I’m excited for the listeners to hear your voice. You’ve been writing scripts for me for so long; I think it’s going to be such a treat for them to actually hear you.
NEAL: Well, we’ll see. I hope so.
MIGNON: Well, as I said in the intro, there are language stories that we see all the time that we don’t really get to talk about in the podcast because they don’t just fit the script format so well, and so we’re going to see what it’s like today to just talk about some interesting things though that we’ve seen in language in the last month or so. You might remember that a while ago Neal wrote a script for the show about whether language influences thought, and this is a controversial topic, and we said that then.
NEAL: Well, maybe so, but I mean, the Whorfian hypothesis as it’s sometimes called—or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—it’s been one of these topics that’s been skunked, I think, to use a grammar term, like a word that no matter which way you use it, somebody’s going to get mad, so you might as well just stay away from it.
There was so much—just badly done claims about language influencing thought in the early twentieth century, that for a long time it’s been this topic linguists don’t like to touch because they’re just asking to be disrespected and not taken seriously. Lera Boroditsky decided to go there and now she sort of owns that space. She’s the foremost person on this. Even if you don’t buy the whole Whorfian thing, you’ve got to give some respect to how she sets up the experiments and tries to control for various things that might be going on. So, yeah, in the script that I did for you that you ran a little while ago, she was featured prominently. She has that Ted Talk; she’s been on “Hidden Brain,” and at first I thought this was just more of the same, but it turns out, no, this is new stuff. So, yeah, this is not one that she wrote, but this being a topic of interest to her, she noticed this and read it and tweeted it, and it’s “The Word Order of Languages Predicts Native Speakers’ Working Memory.” It looks like it was published just this month, just February, and it’s by Federica Amici, Alex Sánchez-Amaro, Carla Sebastián-Enesco, Trix Cacchione, Matthias Allritz, Juan Salazar-Bonet and Federico Rossano. I probably should have just said “Amici et al.,” but there they all are.
MIGNON: We want to give everyone credit, having been a graduate student myself. So, it talks about speakers of left branching languages and I think, speakers of right branching languages. Can you explain what that means?
NEAL: Yes, so, right branching and left branching has to do with how we draw the diagrams for these sentences. So you may know linguists don’t like to use the boxy sort of Reed-Kellogg diagrams that you may have learned in school, but they use these diagrams that look like upside-down trees and hence the word “branching.”
MIGNON: They’re more vertical.
NEAL: Yes, they’re more vertical, and actually, you can think of it like the tree roots instead of the tree branches.
MIGNON: That’s nice.
NEAL: But they call them branches so that’s what we’re going to have here. So they have in the example here: The man who is sitting at the bus stop. So in English, so we have “the,” that’s on the left, “man,” that’s to the left of everything else, and then “who was sitting at the bus stop,” that all comes to the right. But, some languages—and the example they give here is Japanese—they would tend to put that entire relative clause before the noun. So, if we did something like this in English, it would be like “The who was sitting at the bus stop man.”
MIGNON: So, the subject, the key person, the act…, the agent in the sentence; you have to wait until the end to figure out who that is, right?
NEAL: Or in this case, the noun that this relative clause is describing, the “who,” is sitting at the bus stop. Man, woman, girl, cat? You just have to wait until the end to get to it. If you picture it, you’ll see all this stuff on the left, and then the man comes at the end on the very right. And in terms of your memory, you have to keep track of all this in your head before you finally find out it’s a man or a woman or somebody else at the bus stop.
MIGNON: It’s almost like they’re saying people who speak these languages sort of push some of the important stuff toward the end—the left branching languages—that it’s almost like the speakers are doing a little memory test, or a memory game all the time when they’re speaking because they have to hold these things in memory longer than we do when we’re speaking a language like English, which is a right branching language. Am I understanding that right?
NEAL: Yeah, that’s right. So in “the man who was sitting at the bus stop,” in English we hear “the man” and then we already have that picture, and then we can add “who is sitting at the bus stop,” and there’s less load on our memory. But, if we say, “the who was sitting at the bus stop man” you’ve got to be patient and listen to that “who is sitting at the bus stop” and keep thinking, “OK, now know pretty soon there’s going to be a noun here talking about what it is that’s sitting at the bus stop.”
MIGNON: Well, the next thing I want to see is if people who speak these languages are more patient. Not only are they using their memory more, but they’re waiting longer to get the information.
NEAL: Well, I mean that’s one thing that makes these studies different because before, if you’d heard about oh, do languages influence how you think, it’s typically been all about the words: Do you have two different words for blue, and if you do, well, does that influence how you see the world? But it’s about the colors or the genders. This takes it outside the language domain into just memory tasks in general. So as for whether there are more patience in general, yeah, that would be an interesting study too. What would you have to do? You’d have to operationalize the definition of “patient.”
MIGNON: We had both highlighted this one because it seems so interesting and it was different. I think I was reading a different one this morning because it did talk about the two different kinds of blue, and they did a study where they flashed 10 things a second in front of people and then they wanted to know if they noticed them, and just one tiny little thing that jumped out at me is they said you will always notice your own name. And I thought that was interesting. It was saying how certain words have more, I think it was, specificity. I’m not sure that’s the right word, but certain words had more something so that you were more likely to notice them and they were testing these blues.
NEAL: So this I think is the one: “Our Language Affects What We See” and it’s in “Scientific American” by Catherine Caldwell-Harris, Ph.D., also published in January.
At first I saw this and I said, “The Russian blue thing. Yeah, I’ve read about that.” But, then I looked closer and I realized, oh no, it’s different.
MIGNON: And how was it different?
NEAL: So, they did a couple of things here. They say that’s called the “attentional blink.” That’s a concept that I just learned when I read this paper, and it has to do with if you catch your name in a rapid series of stimuli, you can catch it, but then if it comes quickly again right after that, it becomes too soon. You don’t catch it because your brain is still busy, I don’t know, recovering.
MIGNON: From the excitement of seeing your name.
NEAL: Yeah, maybe so. And the idea is, depending on if you have two words or one word for these colors, the length of time where you’re likely to miss something if it comes too soon is different. And I didn’t really look so close at that. The part that I found more interesting was a little bit later and it said, OK so, Russians have these two different words for blue. They have light blue and dark blue, and I had Google Translate pronounce them for me.
MIGNON: Oh, I did too! I went to YouGlish, which you recommended to me and it brought up a Lera Boroditsky video.
NEAL: Yeah, the two words are gah-loo-BOY (голубо́й) and SEE-neey (си́ний).
MIGNON: Gah-loo-BOY is light blue and SEE-neey is dark blue.
NEAL: So anyway, they don’t even say those words at all. The task involves people clicking and dragging various shapes on a background to somewhere else, and so if it’s a red shape on a green background, then it’s easy to do. If it’s a yellow shape on an orange background, it’s a little bit harder to do. And now, what if it’s a light blue shape on a dark blue background? And, the idea is, well, if you have different words for these, you’re a little bit more proficient in and quicker in doing that, than someone who doesn’t.
MIGNON: So basically, Russian speakers were better at picking up blue on blue?
NEAL: And Greek, it says too. But German speakers were about the level of English speakers because they don’t have two words for blue there.
So once again, these are two studies that say, “Does language influence how you think?” And they’re doing this with tasks that go to great lengths to not use the words.
MIGNON: But, it’s fascinating. I mean, like you wrote about before with the east arm and the west arm, instead of left and right.
NEAL: That was the one. I mean, yeah, you totally have to change your thinking around to speak this language. You’ve got to change your thinking—as she puts it—just in order to say, “How are you doing?” because instead of saying, “How are you doing?” you say, “Hey, where are you headed?” and for that you’ve got to know your directions.
MIGNON: Wow. Actually, because of that, I want to jump ahead a tiny bit. We had thought we might want to talk about learning a foreign language and since we are talking about foreign languages, foreign language programs are being cut from universities at an alarming rate. There was an article in CNN. And just a lot of foreign language programs are being cut at universities. And you and I were talking about how learning a foreign language really helped us understand more about English and language in general. So, I think you said taking Latin. I didn’t. I took German, but you took Latin, which is harder.
NEAL: Yeah, I don’t know. I took Latin in class. I never took German classes. I did Duolingo German. So, very different approaches. But yeah, I took Latin in high school. We were living in El Paso, Texas. I took Spanish in 7th and 8th grade and learned a little bit about it there—like we like the present tense and then we got into the preterite tense. Beyond that I really wasn’t too interested in learning much more about it. I liked the class but, imperfect tense? That’s just something in the appendix of the book and we don’t have to learn about that so I just kind of ignored it. But, I remember walking home with my stack of textbooks in my arms and just looking through the Latin textbook on the way home. And in the very first page it talks about declensions. I said, “What on Earth are you talking about?” So that’s what prompted me to look at the back of our dictionary, which had a sort of grammar appendix in the back, and that’s when I learned about the different tenses: present, past, the present perfect, past perfect, future past, future perfect, and other things like that. Maybe that was the right time in my life. I just found it really interesting and then when I showed up at school the week later and we started learning it in Latin, I just found every bit of it really interesting and then looked back at English and drew comparisons and things. If I’d lived a few hundred years ago, I totally would have been one of those people that complain about how English grammar was all sloppy and bad because it wasn’t like Latin.
MIGNON: Yeah, and I took German and I distinctly remember that was where parts of speech really clicked in my mind. The nouns, and verbs, and adverbs, and adjectives, and just the real basics. I didn’t really learn that until I started taking a foreign language and I hear that from a lot of listeners—that they really didn’t get a good understanding of English grammar and grammar per se, until they took a foreign language. And this article in CNN says that 651 foreign language offerings have been terminated in three years, between 2013 and 2016. French took the biggest hit. French is apparently being canceled all over the place. Also, Spanish and Italian. Spanish really surprised me, because at least where I live on the west coast, that’s the most useful language that I could learn. I’m actually trying to learn Spanish.
NEAL: I did not realize that. I’m on our local school board here, and one of the things that I wanted to see happen was increased foreign language offerings in our school, and I’m happy to see that they are on the increase. By the way, apparently in educational circles these days, it’s preferred to call them “world” languages because “foreign language?” How U.S.-centric. Spanish is not a foreign language to people who live in Mexico and Spain and South America. So, “foreign” language, “world” language. Chinese is quite popular and it’s taught online, remotely, and every year there’s some students that will actually make a field trip to China.
MIGNON: That’d be so fun.
Well, we’re going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors and when we come back, we’re going to talk about how we’ve noticed that people think the two different spellings of “gray” mean different colors, and other things like that. So, we’ll be right back.
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MIGNON: Welcome back. So, now we’re going to talk about something that Neal told me is called “one form, one meaning.” I have an article about the two different spellings of “gray.” The spelling with an A that predominates in America, and the spelling with E that predominates in England. But, when I post that, I always get comments on the Facebook post or the tweet. People think that those two different spellings are two different shades of gray. They’re not, as far as the formal definitions go. It always blows my mind, and it happens every time. And I mentioned it to Neal, and then you mentioned you’ve noticed the same thing.
NEAL: Well, yeah, it is actually something that’s well known amongst linguists and the term, “one form, one meaning” is a nickname given to it by the linguist Arnold Zwicky. At least, I think he originated it. He’s an emeritus professor from Ohio State and Stanford and he has a linguistics blog. He likes giving nicknames to various linguistic phenomena. So this one is, “one form, one meaning” or “OFOM” as he writes it. It was originally said best by a linguist named Dwight Bolinger, and it’s one of these quotes or paraphrases I see several times, but I’ve never actually seen the original source that it came from. The idea is there’s no such thing as a true synonym or no such thing as a perfect synonym. When you’re giving examples of synonyms, you’ll probably say something like, “couch” and “sofa”—those are synonyms. But when you look closer, you’ll realize no, that thing we rescued from a fraternity house front yard one time and now we have it on the front porch—that would be a couch. We wouldn’t call that sofa. When I go home and visit my mom, in the living room—yeah, that’s a sofa.
MIGNON: Right, and it’s so interesting because they aren’t part of the formal definitions. Here’s an example of a comment on “gray” versus “grey.” This is @coffeequills from Twitter: “I always imagined gray as a harsh color, the steel of daggers, for example. Grey is softer, smoother, moonbeams raining into the room as I go to sleep.” In his or her mind, these are two completely different colors.
NEAL: Yeah, and I never got that. But that’s not because I’m immune to this kind of thinking because I realized that I fell right into it myself as a child. Hard candy on a stick; what would you call that?
MIGNON: I think I’d call it a “sucker.”
NEAL: OK, and so do I, but I also call it “lollipop” and I had to learn both these words as a child. What must have happened, I think, is the first time I had the word “lollipop,” I had a spherical lump of hard candy on a stick. The first time I had a “sucker,” I had a disc shaped hard candy on a stick. So I said, “Aha!”
MIGNON: Like a flat circle.
NEAL: Yeah, if it’s flat, it’s a sucker. If it’s like a ball, it’s a lollipop. I just went along with that distinction in my head, and nobody was ever the wiser because that’s how a lot of language change happens. People have different meanings or different analyses of things in their head, and they never come to light until one day there’s a misunderstanding. I think it was in high school when the drill team was selling Blow Pops as a fundraiser, and I’d hear person after person saying, “Give me a sucker. I want to buy a sucker.” I would silently think, “Why do they keep calling them suckers? They’re lollipops. Stop calling them suckers.” Finally, it bothered me enough that I said to a friend of mine, “Why do they keep calling them suckers? Do they just not like the word ‘lollipop’ or something?” That’s when I found out that my understanding of the meaning of “lollipop” and “sucker” was not shared by my friend and possibly by anybody else.
MIGNON: Yeah, most people would think they were the same thing; just a different name for the same thing. I bet the “lollipop” one is more common because of the Tootsie Pop commercials.
NEAL: Well, I mean you’d think that, but there are Tootsie Pops and Blow Pops and they actually have the word “pop” right in the name, and people were still calling them “suckers.” It’s like imprinting.
MIGNON: Like you were saying, it’s almost like our brains want to assign different meanings. If there are two different words, we want there to be two different meanings. We don’t like the idea that there are two words for the identical thing.
NEAL: Yeah, why would we do this? Why create extra work for ourselves? There’s got to be some reason for having this.
MIGNON: You and I both noticed another one for “whoa.” There’s W-H-O-A, which is the proper spelling of the word “whoa,” but then, I call it a misspelling, is W-O-A-H. I have another article, “Whoa vs. Woah,” and the one with “H-O” in the middle is right, but I always get comments. People think that they mean different things, and you had noticed the same thing on a different blog.
NEAL: I hadn’t noticed it, but a friend of my brother, Glenn, he posted something on his Facebook page and he said, “Help an old dude out here. When did ‘whoa’ become ‘woah?’ It’s a chance to watch an accepted spelling change right before our eyes.”
MIGNON: Kitty Murti said what I hear a lot. She said, “I thought ‘whoa’ was the one you used to reign in your horse, and ‘woah’ is an exclamation.” I hear people saying it’s like when Keanu Reeves says, “Whooooa.” They think it’s spelled the other way.
NEAL: Another commenter says, “One is for communicating with horses, the other with people.” He doesn’t say which one is which, but I thought there was one commenter in here that had the same distinction, but it went in the opposite direction.
MIGNON: Yeah, I’ve seen that, too. Same with “gray”; people don’t think they’re the same different colors. They can be all over the board, but they’re different. With “whoa” and “woah,” again, it’s not consistently what they mean, but that they always—not always—because it’s a minority of people who think they have different meanings, but when people do think they have different meanings, they aren’t always the same different meanings. It’s just fascinating.
NEAL: They create their own distinctions, and they don’t always match with each other. Actually, Glenn had some interesting speculation on why this might have happened. He said it’s a couple of things: 1) The W and WH merger. For most English speakers these days, WH is pronounced just exactly the same as W. I think our family has preserved the distinction because it’s in our name. When I say, “My name is Whitman, it’ll get spelled W-I-T-T-M-A-N and I’ll say, no, Whitman. And they’ll say, “Oh, Quitman. Q-U-I-T-M-A-N.” When they hear the H in there, they think it’s the H that you get when you have a “cuh” or a “puh” or a “tuh” sound at the beginning of a word, so as a result, W-H is just like many other combinations with a consonant plus H that just seems to be a kind of randomly in there, unless you happen to know the spelling rules of the language where it came from. And if you don’t quite remember where the “h” goes you just put it in there somewhere and that’s why, for example, you get “Gandhi” spelled with an H after the G, an H after the D, or sometimes both. Or “Kazakhstan” you’ll get an H after one K or the other K or both K’s. You just put it in there somewhere.
MIGNON: I think we’re about ready to wrap up, and I would love to end by talking about Squiggly, Aardvark, and Fenster because I created Squiggly and Aardvark and people often wonder where they came from, but you have invented Fenster, who is a character we use in our example sentences a lot. Do you want to share the origin of our wonderful Fenster?
NEAL: First, what about the origin of Squiggly and Aardvark? When I heard the name “Aardvark” I figured, “Oh, it’s an aardvark,” and for Squiggly, the first thing I thought was like Lenny and Squiggy from “Laverne & Shirley.” And then, “Oh no, it’s Squiggly” in and I pictured a squid or something. Then eventually you mentioned that Squiggly was a snail, or maybe I picked up one of your books and realized that. So where did you get Aardvark and Squiggly?
NEAL: Squiggly is a yellow snail because I spent a lot of years at UC Santa Cruz. My husband went to grad school there, and we lived in Santa Cruz for many years and the mascot is a snail—a yellow slug, actually a banana slug. It looks like a yellow snail and he’s adorable. There are cartoons all over town of the banana slug and so in my mind, his name isn’t Squiggly—I forget what it is—but I always thought of him as Squiggly, and it just popped into my head when I was thinking of characters for the podcast. So Squiggly is a yellow snail based on the UC Santa Cruz banana slug, which is a fabulous mascot for a school. And so unusual and so fitting, and there are banana slugs all around Santa Cruz and they are bright yellow. Aardvark is a blue aardvark and I just thought “Aardvark” was a really funny name. Years later, I had a comedy writer do a piece for me about what makes words funny, and he actually said words with K’s and Q’s are inherently funny. So Squiggly with a Q and Aardvark with a K are apparently inherently funny names. Probably my favorite story is—I know that I have listeners all over the world and some people use the podcast to learn English—and someone from China once asked me if Squiggly was a common American name. I wanted so much to say yes, but I didn’t. I told the truth and I said no, it’s just a funny name I made up.
NEAL: I was just thinking now: it’s related to “squiggle.” A snail shell looks like a squiggle you might draw, right? But in squiggle, the “ull” is a syllable all by itself, but when you add “ee” to it, you don’t end up with three syllables: squigg-uh-lee. It’s “squigg-lee” and all of a sudden the L magically transforms back into a consonant. That’s kind of cool.
MIGNON: And also in my mind, they’re buddies. They’re like Bert and Ernie or Felix and—I forget his name now—the “Odd Couple.”
NEAL: Oscar.
MIGNON: Oscar and Felix! They’re sort of antagonistic buddies who play off each other. Squiggly loves chocolate and is kind of lazy, and Aardvark is grumpy and he likes to fish.
NEAL: I would hear these in examples, and then I think there was also like a “Sir Fragalot.”
MIGNON: Right. Sir Fragalot, who shouts out sentence fragments. Yes, his job is to shout out sentence fragments.
NEAL: We haven’t heard from him in quite some time.
MIGNON: That’s true.
NEAL: I haven’t been inspired to include him in the episodes. I think probably I needed another character in there. Maybe it was because I was talking about indirect objects and so, for a sentence with an indirect object, you need a subject you need a direct object, and then an indirect object. So you’ve got three participants and you had Squiggly and Aardvark, and so I just said, “All right I need to put in somebody else.” So, Fenster is a cat and this comes from when my wife, Amanda, and I were just in our first couple years of marriage, living in an area just north of downtown Columbus, Ohio called Victorian Village. There was a corner drugstore, which now I know they’re called “bodegas,” or at least in New York that’s what they call it. That was what I didn’t have in my vocabulary at the time. We would sometimes go walking around the neighborhoods, and like in New York, some of these cats like to sit in the windows, and there were two cats that would sit in the window of this bodega and one of them was black and white. Amanda loves cats—we have several—so she went in and asked the proprietor what that cat’s name was and he said his name is Bloomers because it looks like he’s wearing bloomers. He’s sort of old fashioned. The other one, I think, was kind of an orange one, and that one, he said, was named Fenster, and I just thought that was kind of a funny name. When I started learning German on Duolingo, I learned that “fenster” is a window, so I wonder if that’s why they named him Fenster.
Yeah, that’s all. So when I needed a name, I just put in “Fenster.” I don’t know who you picture when you picture “fenster,” but when I do, I picture just a cat interacting with the snail and the aardvark.
MIGNON: Yeah! Join the buddy group. It made me think, because I did take German, so I knew “fenster” was window, and I was trying to think of English words that have the same root and the only one I could think of was “defenestration,” which means to throw someone out the window; the act of throwing someone out the window. You see it on a lot of favorite word lists and stuff like that, but I never looked it up before and it comes from Latin. The Latin word for “window” is also “fenestra,” so similar to the German. I assume they’re related. I don’t know for sure, but it has a great story. This is from Etymonline. “Defenestration” is “a word invented for one incident: the ‘Defenestration of Prague,’” in 1618 “when two Catholic deputies to the Bohemian national assembly and a secretary were tossed out the window of the castle Hradschin” and it goes on and on. This marked the start of the Thirty Years War, and apparently they landed on a trash heap and survived. This is all from Etymonline, but it was a word invented for one specific event that started the Thirty Years War. I thought that was amazing.
NEAL: Yeah I didn’t realize that that was the event. What I’d heard about “defenestration,” aside from what it means, is people say, “Oh, well, that’s a word that people don’t actually use. They just like to trot it out and say, ‘Here’s what it means.’” But, I have actually heard it used more recently. In fact, I just looked it up right now. Bill Browder, a guy who was the driving force behind what’s known as the Magnitsky Act: sanctions on Russian oligarchs so they can’t get their money. Bill Browder—Sergei Magnitsky was his lawyer in Russia, trying to help him sort out some fraud and tax stuff that was going on with him. Sergei Magnitsky was thrown out of the window of his building and that’s how he was murdered. In fact, this Magnitsky Act, for those of you listeners who want to go political, feel free to go google that and find out more than you ever wanted to know about Russia and sanctions and whatever else. I’m looking at an article here from the “Daily Beast” from two years ago and here it is in a sentence, it says “Bill Browder, a noted Putin critic, says that Nikolai Gorokhov is in the intensive care unit of Botkin Hospital in Moscow with severe head injuries after allegedly being defenestrated from his building.” I thought it was Magnitsky that was killed that way, but maybe it’s a similar M.O. This guy, at least a two years ago, was in the intensive care unit of a hospital. It’s actually a past tense of the verb, “defenestrated.”
MIGNON: Well, let’s hope there aren’t many more opportunities for that to be used in real articles. It’s better when people just trot it out because it’s fun to say or they want to use it, than if there are real reasons to use it.
NEAL: I have heard one other word with that Latin root in there, and that’s just the pure and simple Latin borrowing, “fenestra,” which I remember from my anatomy class in college. It’s a name applied to a few holes in your skull, I think, where various cranial nerves go in or out. Maybe some medical students can reach out to you and tell you what holes in the human body are called “fenestra.”
MIGNON: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much chatting with me today. This has been great.
NEAL: Yes, this has been great fun. Thank you.
MIGNON: Yeah, I hope the listeners enjoy getting to know you a little better and you have at least two pieces coming up—scripts that you’ve delivered that’ll show up in the podcast in the coming weeks. One about—we’re calling it “Witness.” It’s about some complicated, sort of grammar stuff that’s really fascinating. Then just today, you sent me your article about the “schwa” and I love it; it’s going to be great. I love the—well, I won’t give it away, but I think listeners have a treat coming with that one.
MIGNON: Well, everyone, I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl, and today I was here with Neal Whitman. You’re not better known as anything; you are Neal Whitman.
NEAL: I’m Neal Whitman known on Facebook and Twitter—or actually just on Twitter—as @LiteralMinded; that’s also the name of my linguistics blog. Then, when I’m not doing that, I’m teaching English as a second language to graduate students here at Ohio State.
MIGNON: Fabulous. Well, you can find me at quickanddirtytips.com and that’s all. Thanks for listening.