Public Biography
Dr. Miles Westergaard is a professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan, specializing in historical semantics, lexical change, and pragmatic theory. He is the author of Drift: How English Words Change Meaning Whether You Like It or Not (Oxford University Press, 2022), which traces the semantic evolution of over three hundred English words and argues, with evident satisfaction, that prescriptivism has never once succeeded in halting a linguistic shift.
Dr. Westergaard received his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh and has published extensively on hyperbole, intensifiers, and the social function of imprecision in everyday speech. He is frequently quoted in media stories involving language disputes, a role he has described as “being the person who tells people that language is not broken, they just don’t like it.”
He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.