We welcome you today, Prof. Curzan! What a grand opportunity to speak with you!

Taken two of your "Great Courses" and have enjoyed them very much.

Me and my brother, me and my father, me and everything else. I find this fairly recent grammatical error very annoying. Perhaps I've been brought up in the "old school". Surely this sentence structure is not acceptable? I am a Canadian. I use and teach British grammar and spelling in my ESL and Laubach courses.

I'm not sure whether or not this question is related to the chat that is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon (9-8), but here goes. I thoroughly enjoyed your course, "The Secret Life of Words," as well as the linguistic course offerings of Professors John McWhorter and Natalie Schilling. I am, in other words, a linguistics junkie, without being a linguistics professional. In all these courses and in all my perusing of linguistics material, I have never come across any discussion of the following issue. And that is the ubiquity of the epithets "sort of" and "kind of." I realize that these phrases act as qualifiers in normal speech and writing when the author is not entirely certain of the absoluteness of his or her attribution. But I'm talking about the pervasive use of these phrases approaching the level that "like" attained some decades past. It is often gratuitous and habitual among many speakers of some certain refinement and expertise. I hear it A LOT on NPR during interviews of musicians, critics, artists, and other such members of the intelligentsia. It is to me the erudite version of "like." Whereas "like" has been studied and even shown to have some useful linguistic function, I have never seen a comparable discussion of "sort of" and "kind of." I have been aware of this pattern for about ten years. But I'm sure it has been around longer. It is one of my linguistic pet peeves (I'm allowed to have those. Right?) But I would enjoy seeing an astute analysis of this phenomenon. Perhaps one of your doctoral candidates is searching for a thesis topic. This would be a great one, in my opinion. I'm sure you are aware of the phenomenon. If not, then listen carefully. It is wide-spread. Once you become aware of it, it has a tendency to magnify itself in your listening. Thanks for taking the question. Ted Kopacki tkopacki@hotmail.com

Looking forward to this presentation

Might we talk about the affirmative "no"? I have written about it (tangentially in an article about another issue), but I wonder if it is still alive in modern speech and writing.

Where do you stand on the move toward "lay" where we once used "lie"? "I was layin' there" sounds like fingernails on a blackboard to me, but I'm a fuddy-duddy.

Do you think the millenials have allowed text messaging to alter spelling and grammar?

You make a convincing case that changes to English are a natural evolution. At what point do academics and the Funk & Wagnalls of the future have to push back against destructive changes? (Love your courses.)

Do you proof your text messages?