How Did Martha and Grant Develop Their Attitudes Toward Language?

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Paloma, and I’m calling from Escondido. How are you?

Hi, Paloma. Another Escondido call. Glad to have you on the show.

Hi, Paloma.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Sure. What’s up?

You know, A Way with Words has really opened my eyes to a new way of looking at language. I used to be really caught up in rules and what is right and what is wrong. And I recently went to your live show in San Diego, and I just love the way that you guys look at words from a place of curiosity instead of criticism. And, you know, I had your radio show to help open my eyes to this new perspective. But I was wondering how were each of you introduced to exploring language with a sense of wonder? Was there an aha moment or someone special in your life that released you from that judgmental viewpoint?

I just want to say thank you, Paloma.

We hooked another one, Martha.

Paloma, you got it. That’s what we’re trying to do here. We do believe in rules. We follow them all the time. We are hard on ourselves when it comes to writing and speaking well. Every mistake that we make, we’re like, oh, no, I did that on the air. But we’re forgiving of other people, and I think that’s what you heard at our live show.

Yeah, what a lovely question. I would say for myself that it’s been something of a journey for me. I think I arrived at this show very well schooled in grammar and rules that you get taught in school, in part because my beloved mother was an English teacher. She taught eighth grade language arts. And if somebody made a grammatical error in her class, she was famous for going to the chalkboard, putting her fingernails up at the chalkboard and dragging them down the chalkboard and saying, that’s what that sounds like to me.

Wow. Yeah. And she was really funny about it. I mean, I mean, I still hear from from students who adored her. But I learned over the years to be judgy about grammar and use of grammar. And, and you know, I would I would hear a misuse of a word or phrase. and And I would sort of, you know, go back to that idea of fingernails coming down a chalkboard. But the more I got involved in working on the show over the years, I just came to see that there’s so much other wonder, as you said. There’s so much more to talk about when it comes to language, so much more. I just I feel like I had a little keyhole view of language and now I have this big, expansive view of it. Bay window. At least. Panorama. And particularly in my case, I’ve talked before about a tutor who opened my eyes to connections between and among languages because there’s this big web of language that connects so many words that come from Indo-European languages. But Grant had a different path.

Yeah, my path, I was a reader of kind of an autodidact in a lot of ways, always going above and beyond what I was told to read in schools, reading a lot of high literature and a lot of low and things in between.

So I was very undisciplined and unschooled in the kind of stuff that I put into my brain. And it kind of came out in my writing.

So when I went to the University of Missouri to become a journalism student, I realized I didn’t have a real strong, consistent mastery of this basic writing style that journalists had. How to get stuff out quickly on the page, explain complicated subjects, make it grammatical, do the punctuation correctly, that sort of stuff.

And so I sought some help. And I hit upon this was just prior to the Internet becoming a thing for most people.

American Dialect Society has been an organization since the 1800s where academics and dilettantes of all stripes have gotten together to talk about American English, or English as it’s spoken in North America. And I joined their email list.

And over the years since then, I learned so much from these people. And it turns out a lot of them were lexicographers who believed that language should be snapshotted. You take a picture of it as it is rather than trying to force people to believe it’s something it isn’t.

And a lot of the people in the American Dialect Society and on their email list are sociolinguists. And sociolinguists are very similar. They look at language as it actually is and how it relates to people’s relationships to each other.

Sociolinguistics is about language in communities, language in groups rather than single words. And so both of these communities have informed me and the way that I see language.

My wife also is a sociolinguist and a lexicographer. There’s a reason that we’re together because we look at language and go, oh, wow, that’s cool, rather than, oh, wow, that’s dumb. And that’s kind of just what we try to teach on the show.

When you encounter something new rather than being repulsed by its newness, being open to its newness and say, who else does this? Where are they? Do they have anything in common with all the other people who do it? Is this something I can learn more about from other people who’ve studied it? And all those answers lead you down wonderful paths. And that’s what we do on the show.

Oh, I love it. And I just love that description of language being a web. It goes across communities and it also goes back into the past because words have such interesting histories and carry with them so many little cultural nuances that it’s just a goldmine. I love it.

Yeah. And you’ve raised another great point about linguistic diversity. The more we do this show, the more we hear from all different kinds of people. We’re learning from our callers all the time. And I came to the show thinking there was one standard English, one particular English that everybody should speak. But the fact is, they’re all different kinds of Englishes. I mean, Jamaican English, South African English, British English. And there’s never been one English. There’s never been a sole perfect English. It hasn’t existed ever.

Yeah. And so it was really a matter of kind of opening up the world. I’m so glad, Paloma, that you caught on to our message, and I hope you’re evangelizing it with us.

Oh, I am. Absolutely. I love it. And I’m so grateful for your show and all of the work that all of you do for this radio program. It’s really opened my eyes. Thank you very much. It’s lovely to hear and it’s very nice to talk to you, Paloma.

You too. Bye, guys. Have a great day. Bye. Thanks. You know what? I’d love to hear from more people like Paloma who’ve had a change of heart about how they judge or don’t judge the language of other people. Give us a call 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org or tell us on Twitter @wayword.