Michael Erard: Author, Linguist

Michael Erard

I might have been an economic historian or a speech language pathologist. At one point, I aspired briefly to be a child saint. But as everyone knows, the ball can bounce funny.

Michael ErardSo what I am is a writer and researcher. I’m obsessed with connecting, and with figuring out a way. A liberal arts education trained me to ask better questions. From journalism and scholarship I take tools for exploring those questions, in my own way, and taking others along. From linguistics I take a specific angle on the human experience. Raised in an entrepreneurial capitalist society, I relentlessly seek out opportunity. Consulting and freelancing honed my skills at realizing dreams. Raising children and learning to be with the dead kept me focused on the connections that matter most.

I earned my stripes figuring out how I was going to write what mattered to me. I’m proud of the writing I’ve done for The Atlantic, Aeon, The New York Times, New Scientist, Science, the North American Review, Texas Observer (where I was once a contributing writer), and other magazines, many defunct. I have published two trade books about language: Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (Pantheon; 2007), and Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners (Free Press; 2012), which has been translated into eight languages. It helped launch the careers of some polyglots and re-invigorated scientific interest in language aptitude, especially its genetic basis.

I’m currently working on a linguistic history of the first words of babies and the last words of the dying for MIT Press. This project is supported in part by the Max Planck Society, the Sloan Foundation, and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities. I’m fascinated by the symmetries and discontinuities that emerge when you put these linguistic phenomena in proximity. You can read some precursors in a journalistic flavor here and here, and in an academic flavor here and here.

From 2008 to 2013, I was a senior researcher at the FrameWorks Institute, where I helped create a method for designing and testing metaphors for use in strategic communications. I described that work here. In 2014, the Institute received the MacArthur Foundation’s Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. After leaving FrameWorks, I designed metaphors for clients in the public and private sectors.

I have lived in Latin America, Asia, North America, and now Europe. In 2017, I was fortunate to be the first writer in residence at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands. In 2019 I leveraged a background in grantwriting, writing consulting, and research development for a strategic job at the start-up Institute of Data Science at Maastricht University, then transitioned into a role as funding advisor at the Faculty of Law.

As far as that work goes, to paraphrase literacy scholar Deborah Brandt, I dwell in a writing mindset. This means that I see people through their experiences with writing. I don’t see disciplinary boundaries, I see writing processes. I don’t see organizational charts, I see writing workflows. Non-fiction writing, editing, researching, grant-writing, building capacity for good writing in organizations, providing strategic advice about communications projects: I’m probably doing some or all of these things right now.