Ever since her beloved 1st-grade Spanish teacher picked her to tell the story of The Three Bears (in shaky Spanish) on a long-forgotten San Francisco TV program, Kate has loved the study of foreign languages. To this day, she's insanely jealous of those lucky kids whose bilingual parents gift them with a second language.

Until her UCLA days, she assumed linguistics was the study of foreign languages. Wrong. Linguistics is the study of language itself, and she was fascinated by the structure, sounds, history, and continuing evolution of words in languages across the world. Study of accents was a favorite. As a California girl, she pronounced marry, Mary, and merry all the same way, and was astonished to learn that residents in other parts of the US used three different pronunciations. And was enrapt by the reasons why that was so. 

Along with linguistics, Kate enjoyed dabbling in all the major Romance Languages and even Japanese. Though she regrets never becoming fluent in a 2^nd foreign language, in planning concert tours for UK-based rock stars and wannabes, Kate did become fluent in British English, an unexpected and under-appreciated necessity.

Who knew when Sting's tour manager asked to rent a saloon he meant a sedan, or that the request for a cot meant a crib for baby? Though the new vocabulary was easy to pick up, it was the differing accents, speech patterns, and intonations that both confounded and delighted her. It just took a while to instantly recognize that 'flight double 2 double 1' at 'half nine' meant 'flight 2211' at '9:30' without asking that the phrase be repeated multiple times by annoyed clients.

Though she, unfortunately, overlooked a career in languages and linguistics, thanks to her incomparably imaginative, witty, and erudite brother-in-law Michael, and his intriguing idea that they write mysteries together, she now loves researching all things linguistic and living vicariously through Ronnie Byrne–their hyperpolyglot amateur sleuth who speaks 20 languages and knows more about the science of linguistics than anyone.