about me

I was born on February 5, 1981, in St. Louis, MO, the only child of a pair of economists who didn't see anything wrong with trying to teach a six-year-old about the stock market by scribbling diagrams on restaurant napkins. In retrospect, it's no great wonder that I turned out the way I did.

(Oh right, my name. I should probably mention that too. It's Elizabeth. Elizabeth Little. And yes, I am aware that it's "funny" for a girl who's 6'1" to have the last name Little. By the way, the last name of the only girl in high school who was taller than me? Small.)

(I'm also aware that in the phrase "taller than me," the pronoun should, according to "formal" usage, be in the subjective case. To which I say: whatever. Here be colloquialisms. Consider yourself forewarned.)

After an adolescence characterized far more by books than by beaux, I graduated from high school and decamped to Harvard, where I discovered that I was no match for my classmates in anything other than an ability to use power tools and correctly conjugate verbs. So I spent my collegiate years working as a theatrical designer and technical director and taking as many language classes as my advisor would allow. I also wrote and edited for the Let’s Go travel series (which took me to China one year and a stuffy Cambridge office the next) and spent a summer interning for a screenwriter in LA (which took me primarily to a series of traffic jams on the 405). Somehow, I also managed to graduate, receiving a degree in Social Studies—a mostly useless combination of politics, economics, and Marxism—and language citations in Mandarin and Classical Chinese.

Then I went to UCSD to begin work on a doctorate in comparative politics. At which point I realized that I had no interest in graduate-level comparative politics. And so I gained the dubious distinction of being the first member of my program to cut and run. Afterwards, I spent six months in Siena, Italy, learning Italian, racking up a shitload of credit-card debt, and generally "finding myself." (Read: I drank. A lot.)

In 2004, I moved to New York to try to make it as a writer. For the first two and a half years I failed miserably, eschewing rewarding personal and professional growth for the opportunity to perform a variety of humiliating functions at literary agencies around town. Then I got very, very lucky. My first published piece, an essay on language and language obsession, appeared in The New York Times in November 2006. Shortly thereafter, I was contracted by Melville House to write my first book, Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic.

Now I work full-time as a freelance writer and editor. When I'm not skimming through foreign-language grammars or fixating on VH1 reality series, I'm hard at work putting together profanity-laced diatribes for my blog and working on a variety of language, travel, and pop-culture projects.