Description: In the Mideast, words shoot to kill. On the pages of the New Yorker, Romeo IMs Juliet. In India, operators in customer service call centers are required to speak English with an American accent and to be able to make small talk about the Super Bowl. Closer to home, ABC News offers up a linguistic profiling quiz. And George Orwell continues to lament the state of politics and the English language.
Brief description: Michal Brody is a linguist, independent scholar, and lecturer. She was a founding faculty member of the Universidad de Oriente in Yucatán, Mexico. She has taught language-related courses in the Departments of English, Communication Studies, and MATESOL at San Francisco State University and Sonoma State University. Her scholarly work centers on language pedagogy and politics in the United States and Mexico. She's the author (with Keith Walters) of What's Language Got to Do with It? and coauthor (with Richard Bullock and Francine Weinberg) of The Little Seagull Handbook, and has been a contributor to LetsTalkLibrary, Everyone's an Author Tumblr site and They Say / I Blog.