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

I learned an important lesson about the power of grammatical knowledge from that conversation. And I wasn't even going grammando on him! I was excited to hear this novel dialect feature (that is, novel to me) out "in the wild," and I didn't mean to make him feel uncomfortable about his language. But I had. Language is deeply personal and fundamentally social. We use it to express ourselves and connect with others—and to push them away. Our language says a lot about who we are and where we come from, so when we point out something about other people's language, it is almost impossible for the comment not to feel personal.

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.