The Blog

My love affair with language started in 4th-grade French class, when Miss Foutz taught us to count to 10. I sprinted home and announced, “Hey, Mom, wanna hear me speak French?” I rattled off the numbers and felt quite pleased. Years later, my college adviser spotted the spark and pointed me toward a linguistics class. Pow! Match lit, fire still burning.

Travel and language became my twin obsessions. One high school summer found me in Salzburg, Austria, wrestling with German. The summer after freshman year I worked in a hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, to polish my French. The summer after that, I joined a study-group trek across Russia to take on Russian, which, I quickly found out, does not go easy on beginners.

That obsession eventually led to two master’s degrees and a doctorate in linguistics, plus a career that’s zigzagged through teacher training, research, editing, ghostwriting, and journalism. Five years teaching in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia taught me something no textbook could: Critical thinking isn’t hardwired the same way in every classroom. That discovery became the seed for my award-winning book, Critical Thinking Now! Practical Teaching Methods for Classrooms Around the World.

These days I moonlight as a historical novelist. The Education of Delhomme: Chopin, Sand, and La France follows Chopin’s piano tuner. My second novel, Mesmer: Tale of a Medical Maverick, tracks the man who discovered hypnosis. Both picked up awards, which I try to be cool about.

I live near Seattle, where I write Language Under the Hood, a blog for anyone who’s ever wondered why “literally” doesn’t mean literally anymore, or why writing, a five-thousand-year-old hack for freezing thought onto a surface, is one of the most impressive cognitive achievements in human history.

If that sounds like your kind of rabbit hole, come read along.