William Safire, “On Language: Haircut” (New York Times Magazine, Jan. 11, 2009).
Discovery of this early usage was provided us by the netymologist Ben Zimmer, executive producer at the lively Visual Thesaurus Web site (www.visualthesaurus.com).
Read the rest here.
Motoko Rich, “Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books” (New York Times, Jan. 5, 2009).
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of a Web site and software package called the Visual Thesaurus, was seeking the earliest use of the phrase “you’re not the boss of me.” Using a newspaper database, he had found a reference from 1953.
But while using Google’s book search recently, he found the phrase in a short story contained in “The Church,” a periodical published in 1883 and scanned from the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
Read the rest here.
EatFeed podcast, Amuse-Bouche 16: “Locavores & a Lexicon of Revolutionary Eaters” (Jan. 1, 2009)
Ben Zimmer of Oxford Univ Press talks about a century of new food words and the social revolutions that spawned them.
Listen to the podcast here.