University of Michigan English professor Anne Curzan has been feeling a little self-conscious lately. Curzan was recently talking with some of her students about how much research had been done on a particular topic, when one student raised her hand and asked about her pronunciation of a particular word. Keep in mind, this was a linguistics class, and Curzan tends to instill in her students a super-sensitivity to the various quirks of our language. The student said she'd noticed that Curzan