Rosemarie Ostler

Rosemarie Ostler, a linguist and former librarian, enjoys delving into the rich record of American usage and word invention. Her most recent book, Founding Grammars, due out in May 2015, explores how early American grammar books have influenced all our lives. (Most of the rules we think of when we hear the term "grammar" were either invented or popularized by the authors of these best-selling volumes.) Rosemarie's previous books explore the colorful language of America's past, including obsolete twentieth-century slang, the origins of our most common expressions, and the country's long history of political invective.

Rosemarie's articles cover a broad range of language-related topics, from the fate of endangered languages to plain English for business owners. Her byline has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Whole Earth, Christian Science Monitor, Entrepreneur.com, and Elks Magazine, among other places. She has taught workshops on nonfiction book basics and written about research, usage, and style for Writer's Digest, The Writer, and Writers' Journal. Rosemarie has talked about linguistic history on several regional and national radio programs, including "The Bob Edwards Show" and NPR's "Tell Me More."

Rosemarie honed her appreciation for the varieties of American speech while living all around the country. She was born in Chicago, but spent most of her childhood and young adult years in South Carolina. Her discovery of linguistics took her across the country to Ph.D. studies at the University of Washington. After moving to Iowa for a teaching job, she stayed to train in librarianship, and later worked as a reference librarian at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library, the University of Oregon library, and the public library of Eugene, Oregon. She now lives in Eugene with her husband, historian Jeff Ostler, and their cats, Calvin and Pete.

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