Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, and today I am here with Sarah L. Kaufman, author of this fabulous book, Verb Your Enthusiasm. It's an entire book about verbs. And it is, I have to tell you, wonderful. I wrote one of the blurbs for the book,

and I said it was actively useful, a book that makes you want to write. And that is absolutely

true. And I'm so delighted to welcome Sarah to the podcast. Welcome, Sarah. Thank you, Minion.

So glad to be here. Yeah, well, thank you for writing this wonderful book. So one of the first things

that popped into my mind is, was it intimidating to write a book about verbs? You know, in some ways,

it was. And the overall experience was it was just tremendous fun because I loved going through literature to find

great examples. That was just a joy. I loved talking to linguists and social scientists,

cognitive scientists, about the effects of verbs on our bodies, about the origins of verbs and

who pushes new language forms forward, you know,

and where verbs come from.

All that was absolutely fascinating to me.

And, you know, so many people were just extremely generous with their time.

I have a background not only as a writer and a journalist and arts critic, my specialty was dance,

but also as a copy editor, which is how I started in journalism. So I've always had an interest

in grammar and editing, but I did have a lot of questions and some qualms about holy, you know, mackerel, I do not want to

like get the grammar wrong in this book about grammar, which is somewhat about grammar.

But there again, I relied on so many editing and writing friends of mine throughout the journalism

world, copy editors

and other grammarians, and just learned a lot myself. I think that was really the grand

pleasure of this book was how much I learned about verbs and about our language.

So I'm curious if your first draft, if you went over the top and it was

filled with just like dynamic, big, fancy verbs, the whole thing. Or if you felt self-conscious about

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