What three adjectives would you use to describe yourself?

I prefer nouns: feminist, linguist, writer.   

 
What are your greatest achievements?

I don’t think I have achieved anything great: very few people ever do.

 
What’s your favourite smell?

Food cooking, except if it’s chickpeas (I once shared a student flat with a woman who boiled up a pan of chickpeas every day for a year).

 
What is your favourite taste?

A ripe peach.

 
What’s your favourite work of art?

How can anyone choose just one favourite?  

 

What book would you like everyone to read? Why?

I see no reason why everyone should read the same books. 

 

What website would you like everyone to visit? Why?

Amazon, to buy my books. (OK, so I’m not consistent.)

 

What is your favourite sound?

Choral singing echoing around a church.

 

If you were an animal, what animal do you think you would be?

A meerkat.

 

What do you like to do in your spare time?

Cook, talk, watch trash TV.

 
How many languages do you speak and why?

Only one — English — with any degree of fluency or elegance. At school I studied Latin and German, neither of which I can even read now without great effort and a bilingual dictionary. I can still get by in French (which I also studied at school), I have learned to decode Swedish and — since I’m a linguist (person who does linguistics) — I can tell you something about a large number of other languages. But English is my specialist subject as well as my native tongue, and I’ve suffered from the English-speaker’s curse of never needing to speak other languages well.

 

What do you like most/least about your job?

I like the fact that my job as a professor of the English language engages my brain (I’ve had plenty of jobs that didn’t); I don’t like the assumptions other people make about me because of it (they’re often nervous around me because they think I’m going to correct their grammar).  

 
What would heaven be like if you were in charge?

Laid back, with excellent food and drink.

 
When and where are you happiest?

Writing.

 

Something you are never without

A pen.

 
What is your most appealing habit?

I think this is a question someone else would have to answer.

 
And your least appealing habit?

Ditto.

 

What us the trait you most dislike in others?

Vacuous niceness.

 

Which living person do you most admire and why?

My friend Tom Markus, a retired architecture professor: we once wrote a book together about language and buildings. I admire him because he’s one of the very few people I know who consistently lives by his beliefs.  

 
What is your most treasured possession?

Pondering this question, I realize I don’t really treasure my possessions. Maybe I just don’t have the right possessions, but if my house burned down and I lost everything I own, I think I would be irritated rather than inconsolable.

 

If you could have a super-power, what would it be?

The ability to speed up time so that I never had to wait or get bored.

 
Who (living or dead) would you invite to your best-ever dinner party?

I wouldn’t: we’d go out to eat.

 
What words or phrases do you overuse?

Swear words when I talk, and when I write, expressions like ‘clearly’ and its variants (such as ‘evidently’, ‘obviously’ and ‘of course’) which in academic prose usually signal that whatever follows is going to be contentious, illogical or impenetrable.

 

What single thing would improve the quality of your life?

It’s a toss up between being stunningly beautiful and knowing how to fix malfunctioning appliances.

 
How would you like to be remembered?

In any way at all: most of us won’t be, except for a little while by those closest to us.

 
Who would you like to play you if they made a film of your life?

Winona Ryder, because she has just about the worst British accent of any Hollywood actress I’ve ever heard trying to produce one: her efforts to do the voice would enliven an otherwise very dull production. (I’m something of a connoisseur of terrible accents and ludicrous uses of foreign languages in cinema. My favourites include the Scots-accented French peasants in Dangerous Liaisons, and several movies about the conquest of the Americas where the conquistadores speak standard English and the Indians speak either Spanish or English with a Spanish accent.)

 
What music did you inherit from your parents? What music would you like to pass on to the next generation?

My mother wasn’t interested in music, but my father was a semi-professional jazz pianist (i.e., he got paid for playing but not enough for that to be his only job), so in our house there was lots of jazz, both live and recorded. Yet my own attitude to jazz, then and now, could be described as respectful indifference: today I don’t own a single jazz CD. So, I don’t think you can necessarily pass on your own musical passions to the next generation. They will discover their own music, and that’s OK with me. 

 
What music do you enjoy listening to/playing most?

I no longer play, but I listen to a mixture of classical and what you might call ‘folk’ or ‘roots’ music (by which I just mean the vernacular musical traditions of various parts of the world).

 
What did you dream of being when you were younger?

A laboratory scientist: as a teenager my hero (weirdly) was Louis Pasteur.

 

If you could pass one law that was guaranteed to be enacted what would it be?

Full human rights for women everywhere.

 

What lesson of life would you like to pass on to people younger than yourself?

Don’t waste time, because there isn’t as much of it as you think. (However, another lesson I have learnt in life is that young people have to learn life’s lessons for themselves.)

 

What were you like as a student at school?

Capable (the only subject I ever failed was needlework), but most of the time I was incredibly bored, and consequently I was a bit of a troublemaker. I didn’t really enjoy learning until I got to university.

 
How do you cheer yourself up when you are feeling down?

Phone a friend or bake a cake.

If I hadn’t been a linguist, I would probably have been a......

Journalist: I’m nosy, opinionated and I can write under pressure.

 

Which people have been most influential in your life?

My friends.

 

Who has been the best teacher you have ever had?

Sad to say, the truthful answer is ‘myself’. In the course of my professional life I have got to know many gifted teachers, but that has only confirmed how uninspired and uninspiring my own teachers were. I think of them as anti-role models — people I try very hard not to be like.

 
Something that few people know about you.

In my youth I played the bassoon.

What lessons have you learned about life?

That hindsight is a wonderful thing.   

 

If you could travel back in time where would you go and why?

To the time when human language first emerged, in the hope of learning something about its evolution that isn’t just pure speculation.

 
What’s your favourite proverb?

My brother Rory’s take on the sententiousness of proverbs: ‘A bird in the hand makes it difficult to blow your nose’.

 
What’s your best learning memory from school?

Sorry, but from 5 to 18 all I remember is unremitting tedium.

 

Are you a tidy desk or a messy desk person?

Both. I keep my mess in a tidy pile.

 
What’s your favourite thing to do when it rains?

Open an umbrella.

 

What’s the word (in English) that you can never remember how to spell?

Irresistible. (I just misspelled it yet again, but the spellchecker kicked in.)

 

A poem you know by heart

The Owl and the Pussycat.   

What would you like to learn to do next?

Grow vegetables.

 

What question would you have liked me to ask you?

Er, the whole point of questions is that the questioner decides what s/he wants to know!