Ben Zimmer, the “On Language” columnist for The New York Times Magazine, said he, too, had received letters talking of a “grand conspiracy.” He got them, in particular, when he was editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press.
“When people are confronted with linguistic authority of various kinds, whether it’s dictionaries or grammar books, the more conspiratorially minded may use that as evidence of some grand scheme, or something where people are pulling the strings behind the scenes and using language to do that,” Mr. Zimmer said.
Interview on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” about the outrageous goofs that can be caused by smartphone autocorrect. (Jan. 13, 2011)
Have you ever typed a text into your smart phone and sent it, only to realize that the auto correct feature changed “Disney” to “divorce?” Ben Zimmer, On Language columnist for The New York Times Magazine, talks about hilarious and shocking messages sent after auto correct went wrong.
What’s it like being an expert in a field in which every wise guy on the planet thinks he’s an expert?
That’s the life of Ben Zimmer. Last spring, the 39-year-old replaced the late William Safire in what is perhaps the most coveted position in the rapidly growing field of popular linguistics: authorship of the On Language column in the New York Times Magazine.
In its 21st annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted “app” (noun, an abbreviated form of application, a software program for a computer or phone operating system) as the word of the year for 2010.
Presiding at the Jan. 7 voting session were ADS Executive Secretary Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College, and Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society and executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com. Zimmer is also the “On Language” columnist for the New York Times Magazine.
“App has been around for ages, but with millions of dollars of marketing muscle behind the slogan ‘There’s an app for that,’ plus the arrival of ‘app stores’ for a wide spectrum of operating systems for phones and computers, app really exploded in the last 12 months,” Zimmer said. “One of the most convincing arguments from the voting floor was from a woman who said that even her grandmother had heard of it.”