Michael Paul Adams

Michael Adams is Provost Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington. Currently Past President of the American Dialect Society and formerly editor of the society’s journal, American Speech, he is also a Past President and Fellow of the Dictionary Society of North America and formerly editor of the journal Dictionaries. He was an assistant on the Middle English Dictionary, Consulting Editor to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 4/e (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), and Contributing Editor to the Barnhart Dictionary Companion (Merriam-Webster, 1999–2001). He is the author of Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon (OUP, 2003), Slang: The People’s Poetry (OUP, 2009), and In Praise of Profanity (OUP, 2016), co-author of How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction 3/e (Pearson, 2012), among other books. He is especially interested in linguistic
creativity, agency, authenticity, and expressivity, whether they figure in conversation or the language of television shows and films.