This is the introduction to my new book, THE LANGUAGE BEAT, which is available as an e-book here. (More platforms soon!)
This book gathers forty-seven essays and pieces of reporting about language that I wrote over two and a half decades. Five are unpublished; two I wrote for this collection. On top of the forty-seven are six short proposals for articles, or "pitches," that I prepared for editors.
You might wonder why I’m compiling all of this now.
It begins with the fact that last summer, a load of household items was shipped from the US (where I'm from) to Europe (where I live now), thus reuniting me, after nearly a decade, with my physical publication archive. Once I’d stopped moving around and allowed these parts of myself to catch up with the others, I discerned, for the first time in many years, that the past work had a shape. It had volume. For so long, it had felt flattened: a few pages on a CV here, a bunch of unclicked links on a website there. In my memory, it wasn't that way at all. And here was the physical proof. But more than a mass, my language writing was an enterprise, and maybe even something approximating a career.
That publication archive isn't closed—I hope to add more to it. But the past work deserves an expansive new life, because it contains ways of thinking and writing about language that I hope people will find enlightening, entertaining, and useful.
I'm curious to know what several groups of readers might make of this collection. One group is those who enjoy language as a topic and exploring its connection to other domains. I hope they find appealing that the topics are diverse, the pieces are short, and the voice is consistent, not to mentio that no generative AI touched any of it.
Another group is students of journalism and creative non-fiction. I'd like them to see what focusing on a single subject over many years rolls up to. Where are the gaps? What does it look like to get off the beaten paths? For them I included six pitches, as well as a piece of media criticism, a description of a fact-checking session, and the story of a failed attempt at media entrepreneurship.
One final audience are the people who wonder what intellectual impact outside of academia looks like over the long-term. This used to be called "intellectual entrepreneurship." I call it making (part of) a curiosity-based living.
To build the collection itself, I chose the pieces that exemplify the “language beat.” In journalism, beat reporting is “a genre of journalism focused on a particular issue, sector, organization, or institution over time,” in the words of Wikipedia. My beat is language. Over two and a half decades, I produced reportage, reported essays, op-eds, personal essays, and reviews as well as three books, and I discussed my work in videos, on the radio, and in podcasts. This work isn’t pop linguistics; it’s not science communication. Neither is it public scholarship.[footnote]For the most part. There were some things I wrote about language that I did with my academic hat on, as well as writing on other topics.[/footnote] It’s journalism, using the tools, conventions, and craft values of the trade. You talk to people and quote some of them; you read things and quote some of that. You synthesize, you digest. You sketch the landscape by orchestrating facts and conclusions. You assemble a pitch and an editor buys it; they provide guidance as you're writing and editing. And when you write everything up, you decide on the structure and on whether or not (and if so how much) to insert your person and voice. It's really more a way of doing things than an identity.
The goal was never complete coverage. Though I wanted to write about everything, I didn’t—no one could.[footnote]Ask me what I never managed to write about. [/footnote] Rather, the goal was to explore each story’s territory in its fullness, given time, budgets, word length, and editorial flexibility. Any journalist would have done the same.
I selected pieces that demonstrate this fullness in spite of those real-world constraints. I selected pieces that I like re-reading. The ones I'm proud of. The ones that reached for the new. I cut out ones that were too preoccupied with a specific moment in time and those that were too brief. Apart from the pitches and a few pieces of unpublished work, almost everything is available online to varying degrees of accessibility. In theory you could hunt them down yourself.[footnote]I realize that some of these articles have been used as course texts, and that instructors might have claimed educational fair use. However, to the degree that that use could replace the sale of this copyrighted work, you should re-examine your fair use claim by using the fair use checklist at Columbia University. My basic position is that writers should be paid for their work and choose themselves when to waive fees.[/footnote] But you’d miss how I sift and cull things here, as well as my commentary on the themes and what connects them.[footnote]It's worth pointing out that I used the text produced by the publications, which is why the articles may differ in usage matters: commas, other punctuation, numerals, terminology, and so forth. Across the articles, I regularized only the dashes and the formatting of the titles, and I removed some of the hyperlinks.[/footnote]
A legal aside: As a freelancer, I wrote for many newspapers, magazines, and websites, among them The New York Times, Wired, and New Scientist. However, none of my work for those three outlets is included here, for the simple fact that the reprinting costs are now one-third to one-half of what I had been paid to write each piece. That creates some odd gaps in the collection, as if I wasn't working some of the years, but in a section at the end I list all of the language writing that isn't collected here.
The result is an account of what one writer achieved on the language beat in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
§§§
Because these articles were written for many publications over a wide span of time and are arranged here by theme, reading them in sequence, apart from checking out the three early pieces, isn’t the only way to read them.
It might be better to let something catch your eye in the Table of Linguistic Contents, which ties stories to conventional linguistic categories.
Or you might do the same based on the regular table of contents, though I recognize that some of the headlines are vague as to the subject of the piece. They would have been more informative if writers did their own headlines.
In any case, this quick overview of the thematic arrangements might be useful.
In the section titled “Belonging,” you’ll encounter stories about how communities and subcultures cohere because people in them do certain things with language. In “Learning and Community” the stories center on language learners and situations in which people who have different languages get along. In “Language in Public Life,” you’ll encounter the life of language that takes place in public and how the imperatives of institutions and politics shape it. In “Doing Linguistics” are stories about how linguists do what they do. In “Controversies and Advances” are stories about legitimate scientific advances and disputes. In "Doing Journalism" are six pitches as well as three long pieces about aspects of doing journalism about language. Finally, "The New and The Old” has stories about the beginnings and ends of language.
You would do very well here, as in life, to follow your interests. There’s a wide range of topics: migration and asylum; education and institutional life; religion and ritual; technology and media; disability and accessibility; science and society; family and place; the future and the past. Each piece stands on its own; read together, they show patterns and recurrences.
One such pattern is how “language” can be treated from multiple perspectives. There is language as a codified brand-name thing, such as “French” or “Japanese.” There it is, rooted in everyday interaction, as a dynamic set of social facts; and there it is, a private experience, as something people have profound, shifting relationships with. Language is also a biological fact, located in human bodies, a function of human tissue and vulnerable to its vagaries. Language here is “languaging”—it’s a verb. It’s something people do, something they experience.
Another pattern is how people do ideas about language. You might also look for ways in which language is made. In many pieces, it’s subordinated to institutional agendas. In others it’s an object crafted to fit scientific norms and social concerns. Language can also be an object of cultural fascination, a vehicle for personal aspiration, as well as a commodity. Here it becomes a thing, something to be mapped, tracked, measured, coded, boxed.
Finally, you may notice that many of the articles begin with an individual—a linguist, a teacher, a missionary, a language learner, a bartender. Elsewhere I start with a community dynamic, an institution’s history, a database, or the backstory of a linguistic fact. Whether human or not, these characters' stories were funny, sad, poignant, bewildering. My departures were intellectual; the arrivals were emotional. The man wiping his mother's name off a boat. A woman who lost her soft "r." An abandoned sentence. The triumph of a politician. A linguist surprised by the possibilities. The indigenous man moved by linguistic evidence. A forgotten camera that went to space. You'll find all these and more in this collection.
§§§
I didn’t set out to create the language beat; rather, it found me.
It didn’t exist, not in the way that business reporting or crime reporting did, for several reasons. First, language doesn’t generate very much general interest news, not in the way most people have encountered language as a topic. When it does, it mostly fits into other traditional news categories, such as science, politics, human interest, sports, or culture.
Secondly, to the extent that language was an object of attention in the non-academic Anglosphere of the late twentieth century, it was confined to lexicographic curiosities and usage debates. The most visible example was William Safire’s weekly column in the New York Times Magazine, “On Language,” which ran from 1979 to 2009. Another was the Economist’s Johnson column, which ran from 1992 to 1999 and covered topics about the English language. Language was something that you moralized about, not wondered about.
Thirdly, almost no one with a background in linguistics was evidently commissioning, editing, or writing language pieces. As a result, many potential stories simply went unseen, and the ones that were written were rarely enriched by insights from linguistic research. For many readers, “language” meant grammatical pet peeves, ape-language experiments, the Ebonics controversy, and the occasional reference to Noam Chomsky.
What interested me was everything that fell outside that narrow frame.
What if a language were much more than a mere bag of words? What if "language" were actually a multiplicity? And then, if you could tap into the linguist’s fascination with linguistic topics and tie it to a journalist’s fascination with story, what could you trace and follow? You could grasp language from multiple angles as a tool, a commodity, an infrastructure. Not only is it bound in individual identity, it's also a proxy for other dynamics as well as a prism for uncovering the hidden agendas of communities and institutions. Rather uniquely, a journalist had the tools for telling stories about all this without picking sides—any dispute, whether in science or politics, was a fact about the world to describe, not a fight the writer had to join. It definitely helped you develop the story, and understand more about what might be at stake, if you knew something about language or the language sciences and felt comfortable reading academic articles.[footnote]I always read the articles and even the books. [/footnote]
Moreover, what if telling linguistically sophisticated stories about language had a larger goal than turning people into linguists or justifying public investments in science? What if it had this civic purpose: to make people's linguistic investments visible to each other so that they could understand something of how to make decisions in their communities?
This is the way that I state the mission in 2026. And this is the way I conceived of it for a digital magazine devoted to language journalism that I founded in 2014 (whose fate, which I've never written about before, is described here). But when I started at the turn of the century, that mission was fuzzy.
Clearer were the models I had for what language journalism could be.
Starting in the mid-1980s, the Atlantic Monthly’s managing editor Cullen Murphy, who was something of a mentor, had been commissioning numerous lavish long-form pieces about linguistic controversies. He himself wrote an achingly fascinating piece about the ventriloquist’s art and an eye-opening piece about General Semantics. In graduate school I discovered Russ Rymer’s book Genie: A Scientific Tragedy (1993), the first non-academic language book that I’d ever seen. Around the same time, I read Randy Allen Harris’s The Linguistic Wars (1993), an account of debates in modern linguistics; here at last was an accessible account that helped me make sense of my graduate program. Later, Geoff Pullum’s colorful, myth-busting columns for Natural Language and Linguistic Theory caught my eye. Then Debbie Nathan’s lively pieces about spelling bees and a changing white Texas accent for the Texas Observer demonstrated even more possibilities.
Then Lingua Franca appeared. The magazine, somewhat infamous in its time for its role in revealing what's now known as the Sokal affair, had a mission to cover ideas and university life with “academic rigor and journalistic vigor.”[footnote]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair[/footnote] Their way of telling stories about intellectual controversies was so revelatory that Lingua Franca became my methodology. I began pitching them and eventually landed a piece about words for butterflies (included here) in November of 2000. It was only my second appearance in a national publication and signaled my departure from the academic track—that very month, I defended my PhD in English, with a portfolio in rhetoric of science and English linguistics, and decided not to look for an academic job.[footnote]My first national publication was “Grammatically speaking,” a short piece about how journalists weaponize verbatim quoting against subjects they don’t like, for Brill’s Content in July-August 2000. It's a fun piece but contains too much journalistic inside baseball to work in this collection.[/footnote] By that point, I was a contributing writer for the Texas Observer and had been recruited by Murphy to write for a new Atlantic Monthly section, “Notes & Dispatches.” My first piece, from September of 2001, “The King of Closed Captions,” is included here in the first section of this book, “Beginnings.”
Unburdened by a trust fund or wealthy spouse, I had to build a niche. The truth is that writing about language emerged as a survival strategy. I knew linguistics, and from the writer’s seat (not the academic’s), potential stories proliferated. That was the real origin of the language beat, at least the way I handled it. At the start, part-time work in research grants consulting allowed me to write what I wanted and to preserve my mental health. But eventually I grew into a way of seeing stories that was entirely mine. I didn’t want to be a columnist, churning out thumbsuckers about personal peeves. Nor did I want to be reporting on “hard” news, as you’d do focusing on, say, the language industry (where it’s news of mergers, deals, and products). I wanted to write about what interested me. I wanted to swagger doing it. I wanted to get out into the world. I wanted to get the scoop. I wanted to write scenes.
I’ve always been a writer, was publishing in newspapers at 13, did journalism in high school and college, and began freelancing in the 1990s when I moved to Texas for graduate school. Honestly I thought of myself first as a fiction writer. My approach to non-fiction writing, when I took it up, was influenced by John McPhee, John Graves, Joseph Mitchell, and Marguerite Duras.
My approach to non-fiction thinking came from science and technology studies (which I’d used in my dissertation). It taught me that science is a cultural form like all the others, and that scientists are cultural actors. Thus there are always stories to tell about the mechanisms that produce facts and objects. Another influence came from New Historicism, a mode of historical writing that was ascendant in the 1990s. Reading descriptions of it now—“recurrent use of anecdotes, preoccupation with the nature of representations, fascination with the history of the body, sharp focus on neglected details, and skeptical analysis of ideology”—I see my own commitments.
From these influences I developed some powerful tools. I loved how pulling on a thread out of sheer curiosity led to a cascade of insights. Security experts whom I interviewed for the Islamic State series told me that no one had ever inquired into religious extremism that way. For other stories, I began with how mundane aspects of life appeared to the expert, something I called the “geek angle." That’s how I conceived of a profile of a typographer and historical linguist named Michael Everson for The New York Times in 2003, which was the paper’s first ever mention of Unicode, already more than a decade old. Another angle involved unpacking some object or character, scratching at the obdurate surface of a settled matter until it gave up the soft center of its origins. This led, for example, to a profile of Ethnologue, the widely-used encyclopedia of the world’s languages, for the New York Times.[footnote]This pitch is included in this collection. For the article itself, see "How linguists and missionaries share a Bible of 6,912 languages," https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/19/science/how-linguists-and-missionaries-share-a-bible-of-6912-languages.html[/footnote] It also led to the biography of Noam Chomsky’s sentence, “colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” which appeared in the Southwest Review.
If one strategy was to unpick a truism, another was to set two truisms in the ring and let them duke it out. For Aeon, I inquired about whether or not people who speak more than one variety of a language enjoyed the same cognitive benefits of bilingual users of two codified languages. Another rich source of stories were places where agendas clashed. For example, my 2016 Science story, “Discovering China’s Linguistic Riches” (included here), is about the tension between the Chinese government’s commitments to a definition of language and ethnicity and Western scientists’ definitions of language varieties. My Legal Affairs stories on linguistic profiling and language analysis of asylum seekers both address the weaponizing of linguistic discriminations for ideological goals. Not included here is a 2017 feature for the New York Times Magazine on Unicode and emoji, at the core of which was a clash between people who saw emoji as expressions of cultural identity and those invested in the stability of the international encoding standard.[footnote]"How the Appetite for Emojis Complicates the Effort to Standardize the World’s Alphabets," https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/magazine/how-the-appetite-for-emojis-complicates-the-effort-to-standardize-the-worlds-alphabets.html[/footnote] Of course there were stories about the “new,” among them a Science story (included) about innovations in speech error research, a Lingua Franca piece (included) about the northward spread of y’all, or a Wired piece about China’s soft power moves to promote Mandarin globally.
My three books also came from the language beat. Each one had its origins in my questions about a phenomenon that couldn’t be answered from only one perspective; it had to be tackled from all the directions simultaneously, because of how they affect one another. An extra delight came from the fact that linguistics has mostly ignored these topics, blinded by its theoretical commitments. I never would have been able to write these books as a member of an academic department. As precarious as freelancing often was, financially and psychologically, that freedom allowed me to see more and go farther than the academics can.
Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (Pantheon, 2007) is a collection of essays on the natural and cultural history of speech disfluencies (“uhs,” “ums,” silent pauses, restarted sentences) and slips of the tongue. I followed that with Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners (Free Press, 2012), which is the first-ever consideration of massive multilinguals and high intensity language learners from a linguistic perspective. Then there’s Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words (MIT Press, 2025), about the first words of babies and the last words of the dying as linguistic phenomena, personal curios, and objects of cultural interest. Language at the end of life had never been considered by linguists prior to this work.
In collecting these pieces now, I can finally admit that the hope and ambition is and always was for the work to cohere. To add up to something. All the reporting and writing, the trail of decisions and the moments that shaped them, the things that worked and those that didn’t, they used to seem like points on a scatterplot, on the verge of being blown to the wind. So did the reviews of my books, the blog posts responding to what I wrote, the reprints in textbooks, the citations in academic papers, the interviews I gave, the profiles of me. The brilliant people I spoke with and who enabled it all. Now I can draw a line that connects the center of their mass. I can gather them. There’s a relief in that. I feel so incredibly fortunate, and not that this matters in any grand sense, but I wish for you, wherever you are, the same sense of relief. Which is the relief of returning to one's past in its fullness and realizing that you can bring it, in that fullness, into the future.
