What I’m reading March and April 2026

Posted on May 9, 2026 by Ed Battistella
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Muscle Man by Jordan Castro

A colleague who I run into the gym recommended this. It’s the quirky story of Harold, an unhappy literature professor who finds solace from a mundane career in weight lifting. The key scenes are his ruminations during a faculty meeting, during which he hides a purloined knapsack while listening to colleagues he disdains, and his thoughts at the gym, while lifting and sweating (with some homoerotic overtones) in the sauna. In the background is a mysterious colleague who is his lifting mentor and his obsession with Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.

Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard by Robert Desjarlais

At a recent chess tournament, I was in a game where not much was going on and started to watch the other players—the fidgeters, the poker-faced, the ones holding their heads in their hands, the compulsive piece adjustors, and the ones whose hands hovered over several pieces before moving one. I remember thinking, someone should write an ethnography of chess tournaments. Desjarlais’s Counterplay is not quite that, but it’s the next best thing. Desjarlais draws on his own experiences (at the Manhattan and Marshall Chess Clubs and at events like the World Open) to explore the unique grip of from a variety of perspectives. Only occasionally academic, the book gives anecdotes and insightful character sketches in what goes on in the minds of experienced players during competition. A good read for players and the people than live with them.

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave

A husband disappears and his wife and daughter track him down, discovering his secret life. I moved briskly, Harlan Coben-like till the end, where things got rather convoluted.

The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley – A woman arrived in Paris to meet her brother, who it turns out is nowhere to be found. Instead, she encounters an Addams-familyesque apartment building filled with secrets. This book struck me as the opposite of The Last Thing He Told Me, a bit slow at the start with its revolving narrative, but gripping at the end.

Reflections of English Word-Formation by Laurie Bauer

I reviewed this for CHOICE, so I won’t repeat it here. But it offered 30 short commentaries on all areas of morphology and plenty of great examples.

Why We Talk Funny by Valerie Fridland

An excellent book and my long review is here.

The Politics of Language by David Beaver and Jason Stanley

I gave a progress report on this and will post a fuller review soon.

How Deeply Human Is Language? Chomsky, the Brain, and the AI Fantasy by Yosef Grodzinsky

Grodzinsky makes the case that for distinguishing knowledge of language from what large language models do and he does an especially nice job of presenting the history of generative grammar and the history of AI models. More on this book to come.

 

 

Next up: Revenge Prey by John Sanford. Time for some summer reading.

 

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Review of Valerie Fridland, Why We Talk Funny

Posted on April 23, 2026 by Ed Battistella
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Review of Valerie Fridland, Why We Talk Funny

Contrary to popular belief, we’ve all got an accent. In Why We Talk Funny, linguist Valerie Fridland digs deep into the notion of accent, offering an engaging tale of how they arise, how they work, and how they affect our lives. With relatable examples and current research results, she brings together linguistics, psychology, and history of English in a fresh, and sometimes sassy way.

Fridland is a University of Nevada-Reno sociolinguist who also pens a column for Psychology Today, so she is used to writing for real people. In the book’s seven chapters, she takes us from a baby’s first sounds to the prehistory of language and the history of English in Britain and the United States. treats Chapter One (“Baby Steps”) shows us how babies deal with sounds and the importance of the social and interpersonal cues they get about sounds. Chapter Two (Our Origin Story”) goes way back to eighteenth and nineteenth century theories about the origins of language and to the later work of people like Sir William Jones and Jacob Grimm (of fairy tale fame). Chapter Three (“Linguistic (R)-Evolutionary”) is about the formation of an American language and the way in which the r-sound divides British and American speech (among other things, you’ll learn why Brits say arse and Americans say ass). Chapter Four (“Divided Tongues and a Divided Nation”) is about how American accents developed, spread, and continue to change, including the surprisingly late development of Southern drawl and some weird West Coast vowels. Chapter Five (“Classing It Up”) introduces the ways in which social values are attached to accents and how pronunciations might be seen as sloppy, bougie, or more or less employable. In Chapter Six (“ What Color is Your Accent”), we learn about African American language, African American speech, and how we sound black and hear black as well. Finally Chapter Seven (“ Strangers at the Linguistic Gates”) looks at the sounds of other languages—their rhythms, stresses, sound inventories, and how it is that our perspective affects how we evaluate foreign accents.

Fridland also offers periodic SOUND BITES , as she dubs them, These are mini-lessons on topics that will capture the imagination of any reader: why many people find the word moist so execrable, what may have happened in the lost colony of Roanoke and how it relates to the Lumbee Indian language, and why we find certain accents pleasing or grating. As she did in her book Like Literally Dude, Fridland introduces the relevant scholarship without letting it get in the way and she has a knack for capturing the reader’s attention with anecdotes and humor.

Why We Talk Funny also has a consistent serious message: language differences are always with us and always evolving and our accents bring people together in an appreciation of who we are and what we share. Even when we talk different. Why We Talk Funny is a book about language for every language lover.

 

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An Interview with Valerie Fridland, author of Why We Talk Funny

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Ed Battistella
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Valerie Fridland is a professor of linguistics in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno and the author of Like Literally Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English and the 2026 release Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents. Her work explores how social changes, linguistic forces, and psychological tendencies reshape our language over time, impacting the way we think about and talk to one another.

​​​Among other things, Fridland is a two-time National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and the recipient of the Linguistic Society of America’s Linguistics, Language, and the Public award, She writes a monthly blog on language-related topics for Psychology Today, is a regular guest writer for the popular Grammar Girl podcast, and has a lecture series, Language and Society, available with The Great Courses. She has appeared as a language expert in a variety of media outlets such as NPR, Armchair Expert, NBC, The Washington Post, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.

EB: I really enjoyed Why We Talk Funny. Can you tell us why you wrote it?

VF: So happy to hear that! I wrote Why We Talk Funny because my parents were French speaking immigrants and, when I was a kid, I was hyper aware of the fact that there were not many other people who sounded like them in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. Everywhere we went, my parent’s accents were noticed and, as a result, we were treated a bit differently. As a child, feeling different is the last thing you want, but it really highlighted for me how important accents are to our identities and how others perceive us. This realization led, years later, to my interest in sociolinguistics, or the way that language and social life interact. Also, given the South’s own famed accent, there was a lot of awareness about accents more generally (or at least discussion about why Yankees sound funny), so I guess I had a lot of accent-oriented angst in my early life.

EB: Who is your book for? Who is the target audience? Who should I give a copy to?

VF: If you know anybody with an accent, this is the book for them – which means everyone since of course we all have accents.

I wrote this book specifically for non-linguists because there is so much rich history and science behind the reasons we sound the way we do and it is rarely unpacked for those who don’t work in speech science, cognitive psychology or linguistics. But it is so important to understand not only why we speak with accents but also how we hear with accents as well, because there is very little we do in life where the way we say things or hear things doesn’t matter.

EB: Part of the book gives the origin story of English in Britain and of language more broadly. But you also tell readers about your origin story as a linguist. How does one become a linguist?

VF: I think my early formative years as a child immersed in accents both foreign and Southern unconsciously primed me for a linguistic future, but I pretty much fell into linguistics as a field because I was a Chinese language major in college and had to take linguistics courses as part of that program. One of the early courses I took focused on the language of social life where we covered things like whether men and women differ in the way they talk and how age and ethnicity affect the linguistic choices we make and I was completely hooked. But to be a sociolinguist, you typically need an advanced degree, so I went on to get a PhD in linguistics. My first job after graduation was in Istanbul, Turkey as a visiting professor, where I was amazed at how people could tell that I was American from just hearing me say “Merhaba,” i.e., “Hello.” Accents at work again!

EB: One of your sections dealt with intrusive-r in warsh, which I have in my speech, off and on. What’s the story there with r?

VF: I love that you say “warsh” sometimes, as it is a receding feature, meaning that people don’t say it as much anymore as they used to. This pronunciation is a bit mysterious, since the ‘r’ is inserted into words where it doesn’t historically belong. It seems to be related to early colonial days when the “ah” vowel was pronounced with a bit more lip rounding than it is today, especially in the Mid-Atlantic colonies. Particularly before the “sh” sound, which involves the front of the tongue lifted toward the little ridge behind your teeth that you burn when you eat pizza, a rounder lip can cause the tail end of the vowel to sound a bit like an “r” sound. Thus, you get words like “wash” or “squash” that sounded more like “warsh” or “squarsh.” Since spelling was not tops on anybody’s list at a time when people were both likely to be illiterate and more concerned with surviving illness, conflicts, and starvation, the pronunciation stuck around – at least until greater familiarity with spelling became more influential on how people spoke.

In a slightly different version of an intrusive “r,” sometimes “r” gets inserted where it doesn’t historically belong in words like idea (e.g., “idear”) or law (“lawr”) because of the influence of a different process called “linking ‘r’.” This version applies mainly to cases where speakers don’t typically pronounce all their “r” sounds, as in some dialects of British English, and is a bit more complicated in terms of when and why it happens. The story of how we say (or don’t say) our “r” sound is one of the most fascinating tales in the book and it really illuminates how social triggers like migration, revolution, and changing ideology deeply impact the sounds we say.

EB: I have never thought about the aesthetics of accents and so I especially enjoyed the section on that topic. What makes a language or an accent beautiful or ugly?

VF: I think we all have a language that we have a bit of a crush on – one that appeals to us even without understanding a word and one which makes speakers seem just a tad bit sexier. Rarely, though, do we spend much time wondering what makes for a love language, linguistically speaking. Luckily, researchers in an area called “phonoaesthetics,” or the study of the intrinsic beauty of sounds, have spent some time on this question. They have found a number of factors explain linguistic attraction. For one, languages with more open syllables, like “ta” or “la,” tend to be preferred, as well as those where sonorant sounds are more frequent, a category which includes all vowels and the sounds “l,” “r”, “m,” and “n.” One reason these features might be appealing is because they make a language sound more melodious and musical – in other words, they are more singable. The Romance languages, ones like French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, use more open syllables and sonorant sounds compared to Germanic languages like English, German, or Dutch, which might explain why Holy Roman Emperor Charles V claimed that he “spoke Spanish to God, Italian to women and German to his horse.”

EB: What’s your favorite odd fact about accents that you didn’t put in the book?

VF: One fact that didn’t make the book but I find fascinating is that there are some anthropologists and linguists, particularly those who are trying to trace the evolution of language in pre-history, who found that languages became less phonemically complex – or lost sounds – as they dispersed from the original source language in Africa some 50,000 or so years ago. For instance, some African languages, particularly click languages, have sound systems that number over 100, while most European languages, including English, have far fewer, around 30 to 40. This mirrors what has been found with genetic diversity, which also seems to have decreased with distance from Africa. However, this is still controversial as it is hard to really pinpoint anything about languages that no longer exist and for which we have no records.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

VF: Sure. Thank you for the chance to chat a bit about Why We Talk Funny!

 

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An Interview with Renee Owen, author of Becoming a Transformative Leader from the Inside Out

Posted on April 14, 2026 by Ed Battistella
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Renee Owen is an associate professor in the SOU School of Education and the co-author of a recently released book titled Becoming a Transformative Leader from the Inside Out (Bloomsbury Publishing, November 2025). Owen earned her bachelor of fine arts degree at the University of Michigan, a master’s degree in Educational Leadership at the University of Colorado, Denver, and a doctorate in Organizational and Adult Learning and Development from Columbia University Teachers College.

Owen is the executive editor of the Holistic Education Review and she coordinates the Principal Administrator Licensure program at SOU. Together with co-author Christine Y. Mason, an educational psychologist who is an assistant clinical professor in the department of psychiatry in Yale University’s school of medicine, Owen developed an educational model aimed at helping new and veteran teachers to shape schools as more positive influences.

Ed Battistella: Congratulations on your book. Can you tell us a bit about how the book come about?

RO: Becoming a Transformative Leader from the Inside Out is a book I’ve been wanting to write for quite some time. I was a school leader for 22 years at unique schools that found success in unusual ways, and to an extraordinary degree. I think part of that success came about because I wasn’t originally trained as an educator, so I didn’t think within that “box.” The first school I led was a high-poverty project-based charter school that I founded in rural Colorado, where I was living with my young family. Since I had no training in education or in leadership, I educated myself mostly with leadership books intended for corporate executives. That was a completely different approach to leadership than education takes – far more agile and adaptable. I applied what I was reading, partly out of ignorance of what a typical leader groomed in K12 education would have done. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss. Much of what I did was risky, but I didn’t know the difference at the time. And while I made a lot of mistakes, the overall results were beneficial.

As time went on, I wanted to write about my leadership experiences in the hopes other leaders could learn from a unique approach to leading schools…but I couldn’t carve out enough time to write a book while I was running schools. Too busy. Then, when I took the position at SOU of running the administrative licensure program, I wanted to write the book even more, because I couldn’t find the book that I wanted for my program. So I had to write it myself! Fortunately, I knew Chris Mason, my co-author, who has published a lot of books, to help me through the writing and publishing process.

EB: One of the things you discuss is transforming the industrial paradigm. What is that paradigm?

RO: A paradigm in this case could be defined with several other words–worldview, frame of mind, and ontology, to name a few. It’s a way of being that is typically so ingrained in a people’s culture and society that most people don’t even question it.

I describe the industrial paradigm as a hierarchical system that values efficiency and productivity over relationships, interconnectivity, and sustainability. Communication flows from the top down, and resources from the bottom up, with those at the bottom benefiting those at the top more than the other way around. The system is, by nature, exploitative of humans and natural resources. Most Americans think of this system as normal, or “just the way it is” (If they even stop to think about it at all.) That’s because the system, or paradigm, we live in also shapes the way we think and behave.

Students are naturally at the bottom of this system, with the least power of all. Schools in the industrial paradigm are set up for efficiency, with students treated as a future resource for the economy – a resource that needs to be shaped to be of value. Most teachers, of course, don’t explicitly think of it that way, and might be appalled at my accusation. In my early years of education, when I worked primarily with kids in a high-poverty situation, I viewed my efforts to teach them the grammar – not just of the English language – but of the industrial system. I was helping them to rise up through the system. I wanted them to be able to compete.

But if everyone is competing with one another, that isn’t sustainable. There are always winners and losers.

Now I see it differently. I still want them to learn how to think and to gain skills that will, indeed, make them competitive in the economy; but I also want them to view themselves, other humans, and the natural world, as more than an economic construct. If they grow up seeing everything as interconnected and interdependent, the skills they learn would be employed in a very different way than competition, like helping everyone survive and thrive. When I think about what is most needed in today’s world, it’s how to get along. Almost all of the biggest challenges we face – climate change, nationalism, war – could have been avoided if we humans knew how to work together and get along. That’s probably the most important thing education can teach. That is, if we want to survive.

EB: Who is the audience for your book?

RO: I wrote Becoming a Transformative Leader with 3 main groups in my mind. 1) My students – aspiring educational leaders. 2.) A professional development book for current leaders in schools. These might be new leaders who need to learn basic leadership dispositions and skills, and 3) Veteran leaders who know deep in their bones the current system isn’t working. They are burning out, and they need the courage and strategy to instigate transformative change.

EB: I understand that SOU is one of the case studies in the book. Can you say a little about that?

RO: I wouldn’t use the word case study, which connotes an academic study. Becoming a Transformative Leader from the Inside Out is intentionally written to be easy to read for busy professionals who need to read quickly and who want to enjoy what they are reading. So “vignettes” are woven through the book, mostly stories that Chris and I tell about our own leadership experiences—often mistakes we made, and what we would do differently today. I think it adds a lot of authenticity to the book and makes us relatable. New leaders often feel pressure to be perfect. The pressure is especially strong in education, where any mistake we make could have negative ramifications for innocent children. But perfection isn’t realistic, and we want to model that learning is what leadership is all about.

Humans learn through story. Besides “Our Voices” are many other stories, including a brief story about the leadership style of SOU’s President Bailey.

EB: You talk about measuring progress. How does one measure transformation?

RO: The concept of measurement in the academic field of transformative learning is controversial. Without going too far down the rabbit hole of convoluted academic theory, many academics think it is fundamentally impossible to quantitatively prove that someone has transformed. Yet, we know it when we see it. In the natural world, when something makes a chemical transformation – like a piece of wood burning and becoming something different – we can prove it.

But we aren’t just talking about material transformation. We are talking about a change in how people think — a change in spirit, in consciousness. How can one prove that? We can look at behavior change (but ultimately no one can prove what’s changed on the inside). And how do we prove those changes are in service of the children in our schools and the communities to which we are responsible?

Here, I am asking more questions than providing answers. But in the book, we offer a whole chapter on measurement. If you transform the way you measure and what you measure, you can transform the antecedent. In practical language: What you measure is what you get. In wisdom language, “You find what you seek.” We are measuring the wrong things in education. If we started measuring growth, instead of achievement, we would be developing humans.

EB: What was most rewarding about writing this book?

RO: The most rewarding part is getting Becoming a Transformative Leader from the Inside Out into people’s hands. One of the main definitions of leadership is essentially “influence.” I want to influence educators. So the most rewarding part is when someone reads it and realizes that if they want to change education, they are not alone. And together, we can do this.

EB: Best of luck with Becoming a Transformative Leader from the Inside Out. Thanks for talking with us.

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