Danielle:

Today, I am very excited to have Lynne Murphy with me, who is a professor of linguistics, also has a fabulous alter ego as Lynneguist with an award-winning blog called Separated by a Common Language. And I very recently read Lynne’s book, The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between British and American English. And as soon as I saw that title, being someone who loves words, a Brit myself but long time married to an America, I was immediately hooked. I read the book, loved it, and have tons of questions for Lynne. But before we dive in, Lynne, is there anything else you’d like people to know about you and your work?

Lynne Murphy:

I think the only thing else I’d mention is that I teach at the University of Sussex, which always likes a name check.

Danielle:

Yes, wonderful. And so great that you’re a professor and an author. I’ve got so many questions. You’re the perfect guest for this. So I’d love to know actually what initially led you to study linguistics. What was behind that choice?

Lynne Murphy:

Well, when I was in high school, I didn’t know what to take as my elective classes and so I got pushed into taking Spanish. And once I started, I discovered I was pretty good at it. I’m not, which is not to say I can speak Spanish, but I was very good at taking tests in Spanish because I really liked thinking about how the language worked. So by the end of high school, I had taken… classes in six languages. Again, don’t speak them. But it gave me a sense that there must be something out there. And I didn’t know what linguistics was. But I applied to universities that had it because I thought it might be something I’d like. And from my first term, I was absolutely hooked.

Danielle:

Oh, and as you say that, do you mind letting us into how you think about linguistics? Because again, it’s one of those words that probably lots of the audience who listen to this or watch this are also word lovers and have a general sense of linguistics. But as I knew I was going to be interviewing you, I actually had to Google it to try and work out what fitted within it and what didn’t. So for people like myself, how do you describe it?

Lynne Murphy:

it’s funny because I’ve been watching various films in which there’s a professor of linguistics in it and that’s always sort of a way to key that this is somebody who’s sort of intelligent but probably a bit weird. So linguistics is the study of language in itself. So instead of studying say literature, art made with language, we’re studying the language in itself. So some people will say it’s the scientific study of language and we might want to debate that, but it is in the terms of it’s taking language as part of nature, in a sense that it observes and forms hypotheses about and tests those hypotheses by trying to find more evidence. But the thing about language is it’s very hard to study in a vacuum. So we can you can look at a language and say, here’s the grammar and you can do the mathematics of that grammar. And that’s very tidy and can be very satisfying if you like a puzzle. But language lives between our minds and our society. You know, it’s sort of the ultimate hive mind sort of thing language. So we’ve all got…. all of us who speak English have got English in our brains, but it doesn’t work unless we can make it work with the English in other people’s brains. So in order to study language that way, you probably have to have an interest in either how societies work and how that interacts with language or how the human mind works and how that interacts with language. So it does a lot of different things.

Danielle:

Oh, so fascinating. I have so many questions already. And when you think about societies, I was reading your bio and some of the different places that you started working. And obviously, now you’re in the UK and in Sussex or the University of Sussex as you say, but also en route, you spent some time in South Africa as part of your career. And so I was interested whether there was anything from that period that also contributed to how you think about language and how your career’s evolved.

Lynne Murphy:

Absolutely. So I went to South Africa while I was still a postgraduate student working on my Ph.D. I’d say one thing about the move to South Africa is it illustrates the opportunism of my career in a way that there was an opportunity to apply for this job so I applied for it. I’d never had a passport. I’d never, you know been anywhere really. So my first time out of North America was the longest flight, nonstop flight in the world at the time to Johannesburg. And just to start a life there sight unseen. This was before we had the World Wide Web. So it was a big jump. And so, yeah, opportunism sort of allowed me to do that… to say here’s an opportunity, it looks scary but I’m going to take it.

And once I got there it was my first real dealing with living in another culture, living in a culture where I was not the majority, where I did not speak the same language as everybody else spoke and all that. And what really helped me there was I had a wonderful colleague, also an American former Peace Corps person named Tucker Childs, and he would take me to task when I was being an ugly American. And that was the most valuable thing for me in life, let alone my career and my writing, was to sort of have to take a step back and say, okay, this thing seems ridiculous to me, this thing seems stupid to me, but actually this is somebody else’s home that I’m in, and it’s not my place to say what’s stupid or what’s ridiculous. and you will see that maybe this has changed as I’ve lived in Britain, but it’s given me, it gave me a certain sensitivity to my place as an American in the world.

Danielle:

Yeah. Which is such a fabulous perspective to have, to have that, both that outsider and inside perspective and also different ways of diagnosing it and being able to speak about it and doing so really thoughtfully, as opposed to, like you say, that kind of knee-jerk reaction that can be ao human to just think things are stupid when it’s not how we do it. And there’s so many interesting ways in the book in which you really pick that apart and I’d love to talk about the book. The Prodigal Tongue; The Love Hate Relationship between British and American English, because it’s such a fabulous, funny and thought-provoking book. And I’m going to come at it partly for some of the content, but also I’d love to talk about it from a craft perspective because in terms of  an example of nonfiction, you do such a great job with tone and voice and you’ve had brilliant reviews for the book. Lots. where they sort of weave together the different facets of describing it as really funny and playful and witty. And it was called a rollicking read, but also that’s balanced with having this real academic underpinning, also being called erudite. And you make it look really easy, but I know it’s not easy to do that dance. So you’re the perfect person to ask about how do you even begin to develop a voice that enables you to have that balance of being funny, but also the research. So there’s lots of books out there that look at language, but that do so from just an opinionated funny perspective, but without that balance of research.

lynne murphy:

Yeah, I mean, it was a long time coming. So I started the blog Separated by a Common Language in 2006 while I was writing another book. So this is not my first book, but it’s my first general audience book. So I was writing a textbook at the time and I started this blog as a procrastination thing. And so there I started writing and started getting more followers. And so had to start thinking more about what people wanted to know and what they didn’t know and what they needed to be told and that sort of thing. Out of that, various people, agents and publishers got in touch and said, do you want to write a book?

And I would say it was my failures at that sort of led me to learning a lot of things about how to do it. Because when I initially was writing book proposals, which was probably four years into the blog, I would set them up like, oh, so there’s going to be a chapter about pronunciation, then there’s going to be a chapter about spelling, and then there’s going to be a chapter… And I was planning it out the way I’d plan the syllabus of a course I was teaching. And that’s not what we need. So what I had to learn over, you know, a few more years of dealing with people and talking about the ideas. was how to go from being a teacher to being a nonfiction writer. And that, I think, is a bigger jump to make than a lot of people think. Even though teaching, as Steve Martin said, is entertainment. You know, it’s still it’s a it’s a big difference between telling people things and guiding people through things and being somebody who…. I mean, when I’m a teacher, I have to hold back some because I need the students to do the work. And when I am writing or talking to non-students, I need to be more like a pal guiding them along. So I had to start thinking of that sort of relationship.

And the main thing that helped me do that was the book actually started really as a 15-minute talk, a PowerPointed talk, which… there are a lot of things done here on the south coast of England. This started at the Catalyst Club in Brighton, which is one of those nights where three people come to give 15-minute talks. You’re not allowed to know what they’re about before you get there. So my talk was called How America Saved the English Language. And so that was my 15 minutes and it went very well. And I got invited to give it at other places. And so that just allowed me to just revise and revise and revise based on what got a laugh the first time. And the laughs were just, you know, they were crack. You know, they were so good. So that’s where I think I found the voice. Other things helped me to find how to organize it and things like that.

But in terms of the voice, it was about talking to a lot of different, mostly English, and this, you know, maybe accounts for some of the things going on in the book, mostly English people, but, you know, seeing what amused and also learning what I needed to tell people and what I didn’t need to tell people through that experience.

Danielle:

I love that. What a brilliant way to test material and get those live responses. That’s genius.

Lynne Murphy:

And yeah, so after I’d given the 15-minute talk a couple of times, you know, people invited me to come give an after-dinner talk for 20 minutes and then people came and I started getting invitations to Skeptics in the Pub where I’d get to give a talk for 45 minutes and so it kept

getting bigger and bigger, then people would want to have me back and so then I could do different chapters of the book as little talks. I mean, not everything in the book has been…

But that’s what I’m doing now as I plan my next book, which I’m going out and giving lots of other talks about other sidechains.

Danielle:

That’s brilliant and brilliant to get that live iterative feedback. I know that different people have different systems for sending chapters out to readers, but you’re definitely, you’re getting that, like you say, that more general audience and there are bigger numbers and those patterns of what people are laughing at and in real time, that’s brilliant.

lynne murphy:

Yeah, I think you still need to send the chapters out to readers later, but just in terms of thinking about what are the points I need to hit? What’s the joke I really want to get in there? That’s what was really, really helpful.

Danielle:

Yeah, brilliant. Love it. I wanted to ask you about a particular aspect of the voice as well, which is…early on in the book, you say ‘the ideas to be pilloried in the following chapters include’, and as soon as I read that, my attention spiked. I was like, ‘pilloried’. That is such a brilliant word. I haven’t heard in ages and again, Googled it to check the definition. And when it was talking about like attack and ridicule, I was thinking that’s really interesting for this kind of book and for comedy. But the more I thought about it, the more daunting it seemed as almost like a sort of a stance or a flavour to take in terms of…how do you draw your own lines for what you will attack and what you’ll ridicule and how you will and how you won’t, particularly in comedy. So I just wondered from having been through the whole process of the book, and I know this is a big question, but any insights into what you almost set up as ground rules for yourself if you did?

Lynne Murphy:

Mm-hmm. I mean, I think one of the reasons why I say that at the beginning of the book is I do want to sort of set up that tone, you know. But at the same time, notice, you know, it is it’s not I’m going to pillory the people who say these things, although it must be said, sometimes I do. And I sort of have my rules for where I will and where I won’t. But it’s the ideas that I want to make fun of. And anybody who has those ideas is free not to have those ideas anymore. And

then they’re fine. So I think that’s part of the thing is to think about it in terms of it’s not the people I want to mock, it’s the ideas I want to mock.

But if you’re, I mean the people who I do end up very directly, talking about at some points in the book are people who’ve written entire books about how other people should speak, never having done a bit of research, you know, themselves about how language actually works. And these people are big names in English culture and are making money out of other people’s insecurity, I did feel like I could name those names.

Danielle:

Yeah, that makes total sense. And that links to one of the things that interested me, even when you do call out some particular British comedians for their rants, but what’s lovely is that it’s still set within a context of ideas that made total sense to me. So it’s not even just like still like these personal attacks. You put your fingers on, you call it the British verbal superiority complex and the American verbal inferiority complex. So I think it’s such an interesting tug of war you describe.

But what it really got me thinking about with comedy is… we talk about this concept of punching up and punching down, but I hadn’t actually thought about where superiority fits in that. Because you’ve got these British comedians who are assuming this superiority, which in a way is a particular stance, a way of punching. And I was curious, and there’s no right answer to this, but whether you think then their comedy has to be predicated on sharing their worldview? And I’m kind of asking this in a slightly loaded way, because I actually don’t find a lot of those comedians very funny, and I’ve never really known why. So I’m just wondering if if there is an assumption in that you have to agree with them or not.

Lynne Murphy:

I think, you know, they’re pointing out interesting things about language, and that’s what’s fun. And you know, I’m kind of grateful to them for pointing out those things in a certain sense. So, you know, something like Michael McIntyre talking abou…t why do Americans go horseback riding? Don’t they know which side of the horse to ride on? You know, it’s like, oh yeah, I never really thought why do we say horseback riding? You know, that’s fun to think about. But I think, you know, there are other ways to do that, you know, other than saying you must do that because you’re stupid.

You know, you could take that off as a flight of fancy and imagine other kinds of horseback riding, you know, something like that and have fun with it rather than putting people down. And I do think there is a tendency in Britain, maybe in many parts of the world, to think of making fun of Americans as punching up. And I think there are problems with that. And I think especially

in Britain, there are problems with that. You know, to many of the things that people might want to punch at America for are things that, you know, are the direct result of British imperialism,

So, you know, it is, it’s a bit iffy. And especially when you’re talking about people’s language, which is everybody’s…. I mean, I think within the first couple of pages, I’m saying, this is what people are saying about the language of my mom, my teachers, Maya Angelou, Barack Obama, you know, all these people who we love, because of how they use language and how personal language is to us. And, you know, that’s just sort of being mown down as a sort of… those people, that culture, that sort of thing.

Danielle:

I agree. And I think I also have a sensitivity to it, which is then useful, because then you can use it, like you say, when you were in South Africa, you can use it to look at other places in your life where you also might take the easy route…. Because my husband’s American and moved over here and I saw his experience and how he was treated and how often he didn’t even want to open his mouth in some situations, because he knew there were going to be all kinds of assumptions and really incorrect assumptions made. Jjust as soon as someone heard the accent. And in a jokey jokey, but also a way that kind of felt like quite an attack sometimes, or certainly had a lot of judgment laced through. I do think about these things too. And I think it is interesting.

And I don’t think it’s so dissimilar in my head to, like sometimes when, I don’t have a TV anymore, but when I used to have a TV and would watch some of the shows and the comedians would do that, like their opening speech and how the jokes were written. And often it is those  just easy, super generalized targets, actually, I just don’t find funny. America’s a huge country full of diversity and all kinds of people and like you say the whole colonialism thing, and then all the things that we’ve benefited from, from all the inventions and things. So, to just take that one shot at thick Americans or whatever, I just don’t find it funny.

Lynne Murphy:

Yeah, and I think the other thing is that, I mean, there is this assumption that it’s okay to be superior on language because it’s English. We’re English, it’s English, it’s our language, you know, we must know the right thing. And the fact of the matter is, you know, sometimes when I give PowerPoint talks, I have this slide I love that’s just this guy with a soap bubble over his head. And to me that’s your experience of English is just what’s inside that soap bubble. It’s just what’s come into your head and, you know, what stayed. And there is an entire world of language out there that you have not experienced. I mean, the number of possible sentences is infinite. How many have you heard in your lifetime? You know, there is so much that the language can do. I think that’s where I want to find my voice in talking about languages. I do want to have some humility about it, because even though I can go in and I can say, actually, I know a lot more than you. What I try to say is actually we’ve got dictionaries and you could look this up, you know, where it’s not…. there are people who can pronounce about this language and there are people who cannot pronounce about this language, but rather we should all be, you know, trying to bring in as much knowledge about it as we can and we all have lots of opportunities to do that. So when people don’t do that, it makes me sad.

Danielle:

Yeah. And another thing that I really appreciated about the book is just how, I mean, I learned so much, so many things. I was like, wow, that was a complete misassumption on my part, or I got that totally wrong, or I had no idea. There was so much learning, which was really fun in itself, but it’s also, it’s a very energetic and engaging read. I didn’t want to stop turning the pages. I had to make myself slow down so I could take it in and absorb it, but it’s very compelling.

So I wanted to ask from a craft perspective, any tools that help you do that? And there’s one particular example that just makes me laugh every time I think about it because it creates such a beautiful mental picture. You have this analogy about how the British and American, they’re not even dancers, like they’re troupes of dancers. And I’m not going to put it as eloquently as you, but you describe this whole scene where they’re not wearing the costumes that they’ve been assigned and the choreographers sick and they’re flirting with each other and twerking and…. it’s just a beautiful way of bringing it to life. It’s a brilliant visual analogy that I’ll remember forever. And that’s one example, but I wondered if there are any other kind of ways that you like to think about how to make work compelling.

Lynne Murphy:

I think, I mean, in that case, analogies do a lot of work for me. When you’re writing about something as abstract as language and as complex as language, an analogy is really good. I’m reminded though that I’ve got it actually on the board above me. My supervisor for my PhD, she wore a lab coat to show that linguistics was a science. And she wrote and she wore a badge that said, ‘procedural metaphors are the devil’s work’. And what she meant by that was when people talk about language, they often use metaphors, and then we start to believe the metaphors. And that’s a problem because metaphor isn’t the reality. So I think in a sense, using analogies that get so ridiculous that you can’t believe them is a little bit helpful in bringing you back, you know, to reality to remember, all right, this is a comparison.

But in that case, that particular example with the twerking, that was me reacting to what somebody else had written, you know, dialects or dancers interacting with each other. And anytime I see an analogy, I just urge to break it, to see how far I can take it. And so I’d look at that and I’d say, well, actually, how can a dialect be just one person? And when people dance with each other, they’re usually following each other, and maybe something else is going on. So that’s what I like to do is to take an analogy and break it. And I’ll go through many analogies before I’ll hit on one that works.

I’m working on a book right now where I just this morning figured out that I’ve been trying to talk about sentences as ships and really their trains. So this sort of making and remaking. But in terms of the issue of making it compelling, happy to hear that that’s how you found it. I was very, very conscious as I was writing it about how much I needed the pace to go. I wanted to have as many images in a paragraph as I could, that worked together, but I just said something about my mother, Barack Obama and Sesame Street, and so I’ve got a lot of things in that one sentence. So I suppose that’s part of it. When you’re talking about abstract things, you need to have as much concrete language as you can. You have to have as little filler as you can. So not a lot of hemming and hawing.

And what I discovered while writing, I’d be writing a paragraph and it wouldn’t work and it wouldn’t work and I’d be cutting and I’d be… rephrasing and it wouldn’t work. And then I discovered almost always what I needed to do in those situations was take the last sentence of the paragraph and stick it on the top. And it would fix everything. You know? So, I mean, then I just tweak it a little bit and it works. And I think that’s, you know, coming from, we often feel like we need to explain ourselves before we make a point. But actually, what I want to do and what I think works well in this kind of nonfiction is to make a point and then sort of say, and this is why. We end up not using the words, and this is why, because that would be a lot of useless wording. But again, show where on the map we’re going and then, you know rush people up to it.

Danielle:

Oh, I love that. So many questions. I have to ask, okay, just as you’re speaking now, do you ever feel more conscious about making mistakes, being a linguist. Does it put extra pressure on because of people paying attention? Or not so much?

Lynne Murphy:

I think it could, but in the end you have to forgive yourself. I mean, one thing that’s good is that as a linguist, I know that no language is inherently better than any other language. Then again, as somebody who’s very involved in writing and editing and all those sorts of things, I know what standard English is supposed to be. But I also… always learn. There are gaps in my knowledge. There are things that I learned as rules in America that are not rules in Britain, you know, and I discovered those. And so you have that happen to you enough and you have to just go, oh, I learned something, you know, and get over it. So, yeah. But I, what is frustrating is how often I’ll tell people what I do for a living and they’ll go, oh, I can’t talk around you. And it is true, I’m listening, I’m listening to the language. And I will notice things sometimes, but it’s not to judge people, it’s to enjoy the language.

Danielle:

No, I get that. I love that. And are you allowed to talk about the book you’re working on at the moment or no?

Lynne Murphy:

Only if you don’t expect it to come out any time soon.

Danielle:

No, I don’t. And anyone listening, don’t pressure Lynne. It’s awful if you’re writing…

Lynne Murphy:

No, because I have a full-time job. And one of the things about British academia is that there are certain kinds of publications you have to get out on a regular basis. And writing books for the general public is not among the types of books that are necessarily what funding bodies and such are looking for. So yes. So after my little complaints about academia, yes, I’m working on a book which is about the words that come between things and sentences, the small words. So the first chapter is about of. Which I consider to be the most boring word, the most meaningless word in the English language. And yet, I can write a whole 8,000 words about it. And I hope make it funny. I mean, I keep going back and forth about whether I want this book to be funny or beautiful. And maybe I can do something in between. Or both.

Danielle:

Absolutely. All valid. I love it. And, this is a really practical question, but not allof us who are listening to this podcast or partaking in it, mainly me, know how to deal with research in the way that you do. I do have writer friends who are working on things for different reasons, not nonfiction, but because they are period pieces, they are engaged in research and they’re struggling to varying degrees with how to organize and manage that. I can see your amazing rack of bookshelves behind you. You are a professional academic as well. Do you have any tips in a general, basic introductory way of how to deal with research if that’s not something that’s part of your paid job and you’re trying to incorporate into your writing?

Lynne Murphy:

My first book, which was an academic monograph, I did with three by five cards. And I just long to go back to that because that works so well when you’ve got something physical. But since then, now we’re all online, we’re highlighting things in PDFs and stuff like that. And I haven’t got… a great, I haven’t got the system I’m happy with yet. One thing I will say I love is Scrivener, which is a piece of writing software, which is ridiculously cheap for how many things it can do. So I love Scrivener because you can use it as the place where you’re writing. You can draft your whole book in there. But it also can be the place that keeps all of your research. And then when you’ve put in your notes and you’ve put in the PDFs of things that you wanna save, it makes it all searchable. So, that’s how I wrote The Prodigal Tongue.

And the other thing that was good about Scrivener for me is it’s really a faff to… do nice formatting in it, which meant that I couldn’t spend all my time formatting. I just had to say, no, I’m going to let that look a mess. Now I’m going to think about the ideas. And when I’m writing in Microsoft Word I’m like… what if I change the font, you know, if I make this bigger. So yeah, Scrivener is good. But I am. thinking about looking into some of the tools that other people are talking about, like Obsidian, where you can put, link a lot of things together in different ways, but I haven’t gone into it yet. I’m still looking. I know some academics who love it. So I’m, but I’m afraid. I think I’ll have to, you know, hire a full-time assistant if I want to do something like that, you know shift what I’ve got over to something else.

Danielle:

Thank you. And are there any things that we haven’t covered yet in our conversation that you think have helped make you a better writer as you’ve gone along? You’ve given so many helpful things today, like describing.. doing it live, and you’ve talked about the research and given us great tools. Are there any things we’ve missed?

Lynne Murphy:

The social media has been great for me, but I have no idea if it’s going to continue to be great.

Danielle:

Do you mind saying more about that? Because there’s a lot of negativity towards it at the minute, which I understand, but it’s also great to hear what can be good about it. Because maybe it will be a different platform, but we’ll still learn.

Lynne Murphy:

Well, I mean, what was good about it for me in getting the book deal was, you know, I was able to get a large number of followers and therefore it made publishers interested. But it also just, anything that gives you audience along the way, I think really, really helps. And so I was, so for between 2009 and… when Elon Musk took over Twitter, I was doing a British American Difference of the Day every day, five days a week. And the fact that I had to create those small bits of content constantly was always bringing things to my attention, but it was also always bringing the audience and bringing me people suggesting other things and people saying, have you read this? And you know, that kind of thing. So I just, yeah, anything where you can be social in your project, whether that be having a writing group where you sit together in a cafe or be online talking about the stuff that you’re interested in. I think, you know, it’s just that constant feedback from people is just so helpful.

Danielle:

Hmm. No, that’s great. And you did mention that as well as doing the live testing that you do, that you also do think it’s important to get your work read. If you do have readers now, is there anything about going through that process that’s helped you find the people that give you the kind of feedback that’s useful?

Lynne Murphy:

For the most part, getting feedback on written things, I tend not… I think the only people who read my book cover to cover before it was released were my editors and my agents, and they were great. They were fantastic in feeding back. The other things, I very much gave people bits to read that I thought they’d like, because I didn’t want to be exhausting anybody. And that worked for me. And so I was very much choosing the reader by the bit that I was working on.

Danielle:

I think that’s great advice if you can do it, because it is a big ask, because I’ve been on both sides of that process and it is a big time commitment and energy ask, which I’m sure we do willingly, but I think that’s smart if you can do it. Yeah.

Lynne Murphy:

The other thing is if you’re asking your friends, you know, so, you know, my cousin read some chapters, some friends read some chapters, they will tend to tell you, oh, that’s so good. Oh, you’re so great, you know, and especially if you land them with a lot. So yeah, I think giving people little bits, giving people questions, not just, do you like this? But did this analogy work? Did you find this bit clear? If you were to change this, what would you do? You know, I think people need some prompts to give good feedback, unless they’re in the feedback business.

Danielle:

Yeah, totally, 100%. And last question before we wrap up. Never easy on the spot, but are there any particular writers that you love to go to for how they use humour in their work? Or it may be how they use language in their work, but just that you find engaging and delightful.

Lynne Murphy:

There are lots of writer I like. Yeah, I mean, and I also think a lot about stand-up comedians when I’m doing my work. So, when I was thinking about who does non-fiction that I like, I thought of Gary Goldman talking about the abbreviations for the American states. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this routine, but it is gorgeous. And there’s no fact in it. It’s not really nonfiction, but it just sort of shows. You take his fictional thing of, you know, these people in this office trying to figure out how they’re going to do the two-letter abbreviations of the American state. And you see how he weaves into that, you know, asides and stories and things about the personalities involved.

And then you can take something like that and think, well, how could I do that talking about, you know, some grammatical thing or some, if you’re a biologist, some biological thing, to think about how can you weave in and out of a topic to keep it, as you say, compelling, to keep it, to give you a rhythm that’s more than just drone, drone. So I think a lot about, stand-ups in terms of thinking about wordplay and thinking about structure. I loved Sarah Pascoe’s book, Animal, which is about the female body and it’s got so much research behind it. It’s one of the best research books by a comedian I’ve read and I think that also is interesting.

Other than that, you know, there are lots of good science writers out there. You know, I grew up reading Stephen J. Gould and Richard Feynman and people like that. And there are some beautiful essayists out there. So Joe Moran, who writes in the Times Literary Supplements, has written a book called, First You Write a Sentence. And that’s… when people are asking me for recommendations of writing books. That’s one of the… one of the ones that I always recommend, because it’s how do you write a sentence? How do you write a book about writing sentences without being the most self-conscious writer there ever was? But it’s a beautiful book. And then one more thing, in case any academics are reading, Helen Sword is an academic who writes about writing, and she has a book called Stylish Academic Writing, which I think every, I think it’s helped me a lot and I think every academic should be reading it. And I think every academic should be thinking about their writing as something that should be stylish as well as informative.

Danielle:

What a great note to end on. I love it. Stylish. Yeah. Not all the textbooks I read were stylish, that’s for sure. But that’s wonderful. That’s a perfect place to land. Thank you so much for your time. And before we go where should people go to find out more about you and your work.

Lynne Murphy:

Well, thank you so much for having me. I am still on the site formerly known as Twitter and

I’m on Facebook. I go by the handle linguist, L-Y-N-N-E-G-U-I-S-T, on the platforms I’m on. I think the best thing these days is that I have a newsletter that comes out about once a month where I link to the things I’m doing and a lot of interesting links about language and the other things I like to think about. And if you go to my Twitter profile, you’ll see the link to get to the newsletter.

Danielle:

Wonderful. And I’ll put that in the show notes as well. Perfect. Thanks so much, Lynne. It was so fun chatting.

lynne murphy:

Lovely to talk to you. Thanks.