Grammar Girl here. I'm Minion Fogarty, and today I'm here with Sally Taglamante from the linguistics

Department at the University of Toronto and a self-described language detective. And you were

just going to love hearing about her work today. Sally, welcome to the

Grammar Girl podcast. It's great to be here. So happy to have you. So we have so much to talk about,

but I want to start with your work on teens and teen conversation and the words they use. First,

I'm so curious how you even do this research, because I keep imagining the Steve Bouchemmy meme.

Like, hello, fellow kids.

So how do you get past that?

That's not how you do it.

That's not how you do it.

The simple and very straightforward answer is, well, first of all, I'm a language scientist.

So language antenna, I,

always, always working. But the great thing about being a language scientist is when you have

five children. So as my kids were becoming, you know, pre-adolescence, I'd have

I found myself in a whole new world of interesting new linguistic

phenomena that was right at my breakfast table. I had furious to that done a lot of work on,

you know, rural dialects and, you know, older people because that's where interesting

linguistic phenomena live that are dying and we want to catch them before they're gone. But when my kids became teenagers, it was like, whoa, something is cool going on here. And so what you do in order to study that is you do nothing.

You do not say to your children anything that would let them think that you were listening to them, right?

You just say nothing.

And so for a good long time, I said absolutely nothing.

And I would volunteer to take kids to soccer

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