Has language, and the veracity of language, become irrelevant in the modern technological age? It might be a bit of a leap to make too much out of the decision to end the run of the “On Language” column that appeared every Sunday in The New York Times Magazine, a column started in 1979 by legendary political reporter William Safire. But as the use of language, and grammatical standards, become looser and slang becomes more widely accepted, could the end of an iconic column examining language be a sign of the times? Ben Zimmer, the columnist who took over “On Language” from Safire, wonders about the future of language when “every aspect of our linguistic life is open to technologization of one form or another” and “our growing expectations that computer interfaces should be able to recognize our speech and text, understand it and talk back to us.” We look back on the 31 years of “On Language” and look forward to the future human communication.
Deb Amlen, “The Only Constant” (Wordplay, the crossword blog of The New York Times, Mar. 4, 2011).
For those of us who toil and revel in the world of words, it started with the end of Ben Zimmer’s column, “On Language.”
Ben is a colleague of mine, and a more-than-worthy successor to William Safire, the column’s mainstay since 1979. To be frank, it hurt to lose a column that provoked so much conversation among word lovers and students of etymology. Online discussion groups and social media outlets blazed with palpable outrage.
I met with now-former New York Times “On Language” magazine columnist Ben Zimmer one afternoon at a coffee shop in SoHo to discuss the contemporary onslaught of perceived randomness. He is the executive producer of two language-related websites, a consultant for the OED, a graduate of linguistics from Yale, a member of the American Dialect Society and the Dictionary Society of North America, and is not a nerd, but a gentleman.
Zimmer describes the word random as a defuser of social tension, a kind of “all-purpose label” for anything out of the norm.
Ben Zimmer could certainly advise anyone which word to use right now. And before him, William Safire would have, too.
Last Sunday The New York Times Magazine published the final “On Language” column. For three decades, it reminded readers of middle school teachers hammering home vocabulary words and sentence structure. And the words and phrases weren’t wily-nilly either — they were pegged to the news.
Johnson, the language blog of The Economist, discusses the suspension of The New York Times Magazine‘s On Language column.
When Safire died several years ago, the column was taken up by Ben Zimmer, who took on the serious and the silly in language with wit and verve undergirded by a vast amount of knowledge. This blog has often found reason to rely on him. Now the column is no more; the magazine’s new editor axed it, along with several other features. Every new editor has the right to a shake-up, but with no disrespect to those others, though, “On Language” was a long-lived and beloved institution, the only place in American journalism where language was given such prominence. Cutting it was a mistake.