18 hours of English etymology, linguistic history, and current language usage! If that sounds like a treasure chest of awesome to you (as opposed to a cardboard box of boring), you need this. I am a fan of The Great Courses and Anne Curzan, and this audiobook was both entertaining and informative. Anne's love of language and passion for her work comes through well. She adds just the right amount of humor and humanity into her lectures to make the material relatable and perhaps even interesting to people not normally drawn to linguistics. You'd be surprised how many words and phrases you use every day are covered in this course! ( )

An excellent series of lectures -- interesting, thoughtful, presented in a low-key and accessible way. An underlying theme is that language is an instrument of emotional and intuitive engagement. This takes the course beyond an old-fashioned analysis of language as a mapping of connotations, with a '"right" and an "incorrect" way of expressing things. ( )

I was tolerably familiar with much of the subject matter, but the presentation was excellent. I would happily listen to it again. (She exploded "laser" into its constituent words incorrectly, and made a few other errors that I can't remember anymore. But these are minor problems.) I enjoyed her discussion of spoken versus written English and promptly noticed "gonna" appearing in some dialogue in a novel I was reading. I would never have noticed it otherwise. The speaker in the novel is an American, although the period is during WWI. Is "gonna" really that old, or was the writer indulging in an anachronism for effect? Guess I will have to listen to those lectures again! ( )

Curzan is one of the smoothest Teaching Company presenters I have encountered. She is fascinated with her subject and she guides on a wide-ranging survey of the English language, where it came from, how it has evolved, and how it is still changing. The last part will be problematic for some ultra-conservative language purists, but as Curzan shows, the language has constantly changed, and what we consider horrific today will be commonplace tomorrow. She gives examples of words Ben Franklin hated, for instance, that are now a standard part of our language. I listened in my car, so I can't say what visual elements the course has, but the purely auditory experience never left me feeling that I was missing anything. ( )