special event: Mark Liberman, Free Library of Philadelphia

Mark Liberman (Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log) will be a featured panelist at a special one-time linguistic event at the Free Library of Philadelphia on Thursday, February 8. It begins at 7:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Abusage and Usage: A Panel on Language will feature Mark Liberman, Erin McKean, John McWhorter and Ben Yagoda, with Carolyn Marvin moderating.

If you're in the Philly area, enjoy an evening of etymologic mayhem, sensational syntactic investigation, and grammar gone wild with Mark Liberman, editor of Language Log, co-author of Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log, and Professor of Phonetics in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania; Erin McKean, Senior Editor for the Oxford University Press North American Dictionary Program and author of Totally Weird and Wonderful Words; John McWhorter Professor of Linguistics, NPR commentator, and best-selling author of Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care; and Ben Yagoda, freelance journalist and Professor of English whose books include The Sound on the Page and If You Catch an Adjective Kill It. The evening will be moderated by Carolyn Marvin, Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication.