My 1996 book, Slang and Sociability: In-Group Language Among College Students (UNC Press) brings together various strands of my research on college slang presented as articles and conference papers from 1979 through 1993. The book is based on a corpus of more than ten thousand items of slang contributed by undergraduates at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1972 to 1993.

My next long research project is a critical biography of Louise Pound, founding editor of the journal American Speech and the first woman president of the Modern Language Association. In the meanwhile, I have taken up the job that Louise Pound began in 1925 by becoming editor of American Speech, now a quarterly journal of the American Dialect Society. I also serve as Secretary-Treasurer of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. Since teaching at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizinte in 1994, I have become taken with all things Brazilian, and I continue to struggle with learning Portuguese.

(Photo: Connie Eble (left) and Lousiana Governor Kathleen Babineau Blanco at the commemoration of the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, December 20th, 2003.)