Ben Zimmer is the executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com,
language columnist for The Boston Globe and former On Language columnist for The New York Times.
The Boston Globe
American Dialects from A to Z (Jan. 15, 2012)
A massive dictionary of regional language gets to ‘zydeco’—now what?
Twenty-What? Two Thousand Who? (Jan. 1, 2012)
Saying the new year out loud.
The New York Times Book Review
Letters on the Loose (Nov. 10, 2011)
The alphabet leaps to life in these new picture books.
The New York Times Sunday Review
Twitterology: A New Science? (Oct. 30, 2011)
For researchers, Twitter provides virtually limitless data about language in action.
Read “The Word” columns from The Boston Globe here and
“On Language” columns from The New York Times here.
In the News
Poynter, “2011 Word of the Year Shows How Old Words Take on New Meanings”
“It has taken on new parts of speech and new meanings, related to the protest movement and its style of demonstrations,” Ben Zimmer, chair of the organization’s New Words Committee, told me.
CNN, “Linguists Name ‘Occupy’ as 2011’s Word of the Year”
“It’s a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life,” Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee for the American Dialect Society, said in a statement.
American Dialect Society, “‘Occupy’ is the 2011 Word of the Year”
Official announcement of “occupy” as the 2011 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.
Read more news here.