Highly Irregular with Arika Okrent

Thursday, July 08, 2021 | 6:30 p.m.

Have you ever stopped to think about how weird the English language can be? It is riddled with irregular verbs, inconsistent spellings, silent letters, and pronunciations that seem completely random.  And then there are the peculiarities of usage: why do we move slowly but never fastly? Why do we count eleven, twelve instead of oneteen, twoteen? Although the explanations aren’t always logical, linguist Arika Okrent does her best at unraveling these age-old questions. Along the way, Okrent tells the story of the many influences — from invading French armies to stubborn Flemish printers — that made our language the way it is today.

You can purchase Arika’s new book, Highly Irregular, at our Bookshop.org storefront.