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Word Routes is Ben Zimmer’s column on the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com. Subscribe to the feed here.

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How “Kung Fu” Entered the Popular Lexicon
Jan. 17, 2014
When Run Run Shaw, a giant of the Hong Kong entertainment industry, died earlier this month at the ripe old age of 106, I took the opportunity to look at a term with which he was intimately connected: kung fu. In the 1970s, martial-arts movies from the Shaw Brothers studio (and its Hong Kong rival, Golden Harvest) firmly planted kung fu in the global consciousness. But I was surprised to learn that kung fu as we know it was actually born on American soil.

“Because” Wins 2013 Word of the Year Vote, Because Awesome
Jan. 4, 2014
Leading up to the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year vote last night, handicappers might have favored such terms as selfie, twerk, or Obamacare as possible winners. But the society’s selection was a bit of a surprise: the humble word because, which has recently expanded in new grammatical directions in informal use online.

Presenting the Nominees for 2013 Word of the Year
Jan. 3, 2014
At the American Dialect Society’s annual conference in Minneapolis, we have nominated words in various categories in our Word of the Year selection. I presided over the nominating session on Thursday in my capacity as chair of the society’s New Words Committee. Winners will be selected from the different categories on Friday evening, culminating in the vote for the overall Word of the Year. Here’s the list of nominees.

The Year in Words, 2013 Edition
Dec. 30, 2013
As the year comes to a close, it’s time once again to survey the new words and phrases that made their presence felt in the popular consciousness. For the Wall Street Journal, I surveyed the “words that popped in 2013,” from cronut to Sharknado, but there were too many good choices to include in one article. Here I present my more comprehensive list of notable words of the year.

For Dr. Who’s Anniversary, the Story Behind “Dalek”
Nov. 22, 2013
While Americans this week have marked the sad anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, there is a more pleasant commemoration going on as well. On Nov. 23, 1963, the day after Kennedy died, the BBC first broadcast the science-fiction series “Doctor Who.” The franchise is still going strong 50 years later. To celebrate, let’s look at one of the lexical contributions of “Doctor Who”: the name for the nefarious alien race, “Dalek.”

A Well-Traveled Metaphor: “Goldilocks” Visits Many Houses
Nov. 18, 2013
We all know the old fairy tale: Goldilocks enters the house of the Three Bears and samples their porridge, their chairs, and their beds. Each time she finds one item that’s “just right.” In recent years, the familiar story has been making the rounds, with the word “Goldilocks” showing up in some unexpected contexts, from astronomy to economy.

The Hidden History of “Glitch”
Nov. 4, 2013
The persistent glitchiness of HealthCare.gov, the website implementing the Affordable Care Act, has given us much time to ponder that peculiar little word, glitch. As it happens, some new research on the word brings its origin, most likely from Yiddish, into a sharper perspective.

Games of “Chicken,” from Hot Rodders to Politicians
Oct. 18, 2013
With the government shutdown over and the default crisis averted, what many commentators called a “game of chicken” has finally ended on Capitol Hill. In my latest column for the Wall Street Journal, I take a look at how political stare-downs earned this appellation, and how chickens became animalistic symbols of cowardice in the first place.

“Septaper” and “Octaper”: Fed-Watchers Remake the Calendar
Sept. 24, 2013
By Ben Zimmer
Last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke foiled the predictions of many analysts that September would usher in tapering, or the gradual slowdown of the bond-buying policy that the Fed instituted to keep long-term interest rates low. Those analysts even had renamed the month Septaper, but now they’re looking ahead to a possible Octaper. After that, it gets a bit harder to come up with clever month-blends.

Of Pinpricks and Slam-Dunks: The Rhetoric of the Syrian Conflict
Sept. 13, 2013
The situation in Syria has revived a number of well-worn foreign-policy phrases, from “boots on the ground” to “slam-dunks” and “smoking guns.” As the American response to the conflict has involved far more in the way of words than deeds, it’s worth taking a closer look at the words used by officials and commentators, no matter how hackneyed.

The “Bubble” That Keeps on Bubbling
Aug. 27, 2013
“We have to turn the page on the bubble-and-bust mentality,” President Obama said in a recent weekly address. After the economic ruin of the housing bubble, it’s hard to argue with that sentiment. But “bubbles” have long been with us — the metaphor of the bubble has been applied to fragile financial schemes for nearly three centuries, originating as a literary device.

The Straight Dope on “Doping”
Aug. 19, 2013
With endless drama swirling around disgraced baseball players like Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez, the word doping has been firmly ensconced in American sports headlines, just as it has been in international coverage of cycling and track and field. How doping came to refer to taking drugs to improve one’s athletic performance, however, is a complicated story.

Keeping a Watch on “Binge-Watching”
Aug. 9, 2013
The eagerly anticipated final season of “Breaking Bad” has led to a lot of viewers catching up on past episodes marathon-style. For my latest Wall Street Journal column, I use this moment of mass-media consumption to dive into the history of “binge-watching.”

How “Drone” Got Off the Ground
August 2, 2013
For my most recent “Word on the Street” column in the Wall Street Journal, I consider the history of a word very much in the news: drone, referring to a pilotless aircraft guided by remote control. It turns out the term has been on a long, strange trip from early prototypes in the 1930s to the current controversial U.S. program of covert drone strikes.

A Whistlestop Tour of “Whistleblowers”
July 19, 2013
Edward Snowden’s leaking of National Security Agency information has put the term whistleblower back in the news. Since the early 1970s, whistleblower has come to be seen as a positive term, but before that it had been decidedly negative for many decades.

Debunking the Legend of “Upset”
July 12, 2013
Some stories about word origins recall the old Italian saying, se è non vero, è ben trovato: even if it is not true, it is well invented. One such too-good-to-check story involves the sporting usage of upset, which, it is said, came to be because an unfavored horse named Upset beat the great thoroughbred Man o’ War.

New Light on “Uncle Sam”
July 4, 2013
Last December I commemorated the two hundredth anniversary of what was then the first-known appearance of “Uncle Sam” as a personification of the United States, which turned up in a Bennington, Vermont newspaper. Now, just in time for the Fourth of July, comes new evidence that “Uncle Sam” was in use as early as 1810, more than two years before the phrase’s popularization in the War of 1812.

Words in the Courtroom, from Mobspeak to “Argle-Bargle”
June 27, 2013
American courtrooms can produce some fascinating linguistic specimens. Two high-profile court cases have put language on display. In Boston, the trial of mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger has provided testimony full of old-school crime lingo. Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion on the Defense of Marriage Act featured some “legalistic argle-bargle.”

Would You Prefer a “Cronut” or a “Dossant”?
June 14, 2013
In my latest column for the Boston Globe, I look at the recent craze for “cronuts,” which are a croissant-doughnut hybrid created by an upscale French bakery in Manhattan. It was such a hit that imitators have created their own hybrids using names like dossant or doissant. Regardless of these concoctions’ culinary qualities, is cronut a more appealing name than other combinations of croissant and do(ugh)nut?

How “Emo” Got Political
June 7, 2013
When Fox News host Megyn Kelly gamely took on Erick Erickson, a contributor to the network, for his provocative statements about gender roles last week, she was puzzled by one word in particular that Erickson had used to describe his ideological opponents. “I don’t know what the word is… some sort of liberals, eco-liberals, what did you call them?” “Emo liberals,” Erickson clarified.

2013 Spelling Bee: Arvind Mahankali Turns “German Curse” Into “German Blessing”
May 31, 2013
Much of the buzz leading up to the 86th Scripps National Spelling Bee had to do with the first-ever inclusion of vocabulary questions in the off-stage portions of the competition. But in the end, it came down to a traditional spelling face-off over tricky words originating from other languages. Arvind Mahankali of Bayside Hills, New York had been stumped by German-derived words in the last two Bees, but this time a German word was his salvation.

2013 Spelling Bee: 42 Make it Through Vocabulary-Infused Preliminaries
May 30, 2013
Two hundred eighty-one young contestants took on the new-and-improved preliminaries of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which for the first time included questions about words’ definitions along with their spellings. After the dust had cleared, 42 of them managed to make it to Thursday’s semifinals.

2013 Spelling Bee: Vocabulary Questions in the Spotlight
May 29, 2013
It’s time once again for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and the big news going into this year’s competition is the inclusion of vocabulary questions along with the traditional spelling questions. Even though the new multiple-choice questions testing contestants’ knowledge of definitions will only appear in the off-stage computerized portions of the Bee, it’s still a controversial shift in format.

Leaning Back to Look at “Lean In”
May 23, 2013
“Lean in,” thanks to the title of a new book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, has become “the idiom of the moment,” Motoko Rich writes in the New York Times, adding “the phrase seems to have taken on a life of its own.” But where did all of this “leaning in” come from?

An Army of “Strong” Slogans
May 17, 2013
In my latest column for the Boston Globe, I take a look at the rapid rise of the slogan “Boston Strong” in the month since the Marathon bombing. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but it’s only the latest in a long line of “strong” slogans.

How “Baloney” Got Phony
May 3, 2013
An Inside Higher Ed article recently quoted Duke University physics professor Steffen Bass as describing the foolish stance of some of his colleagues as “bologna.” Prof. Bass surely said baloney, a spelling that represents an Americanized pronunciation of bologna sausage, and it also came to mean “nonsense” in the 1920s.

Words from a “Surreal” Week in Boston
Apr. 22, 2013
What the city of Boston experienced last week was described again and again as surreal. It was the only word that seemed capable of encompassing the week’s unfolding events, from Monday’s deadly explosions at the Boston Marathon finish line to Friday’s lockdown of the city as SWAT teams zeroed in on the remaining suspect of the bombing.

Word on the Street: Sketchy Traffic Lingo
Apr. 12, 2013
In my latest column for The Boston Globe, I observed that Beantown has more than its fair share of local terms for sketchy traffic maneuvers: the Boston left, the Boston bump, the Boston block, and so forth. But these regional labels can be found all over the country, and new ones keep cropping up.

A “Scalawag” in the Family Tree
Mar. 15, 2013
Scalawag, “a deceitful and unreliable scoundrel,” is a fun word to say. It sounds like something a pirate on the high seas might call a rival. In fact, it originated in western New York in the 1830s, and a young genealogy buff recently turned up some fascinating early evidence on the word when he was investigating an ancestor.

Anointing the Crossword and Palindrome Champions
Mar. 11, 2013
For those who like their wordplay competitive, this weekend featured two high-stakes contests: the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and the first-ever Symmys Awards for the year’s best palindromes. The top contenders at the ACPT were the same names that have dominated the crossword world for the past few years, while the surprise overall winner of the Symmys was a palindromic novice.

A Wordy Weekend, from Crosswords to Palindromes
Mar. 8, 2013
This weekend, it’s time once again for the best crossword solvers to gather in Brooklyn for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Meanwhile, in Portland, Oregon, another kind of wordy celebration is going on, as the winners will be announced in the first annual Symmys Awards, given to the best palindromes of the year.

The Return of the Grammar Haiku Contest
Feb. 28, 2013
National Grammar Day is just around the corner — it falls on Monday, March 4th (march forth, get it?). Among the festivities is the annual Grammar Haiku Contest, overseen by editor Mark Allen. In the contest, verbivores vie for glory by submitting grammar- or usage-based haikus on Twitter. This year, I’ve been asked to be a judge.

Letting “Sequester” Fester
Feb. 21, 2013
CNN Money has announced that it will “steer clear” of the word sequestration, along with its snappier cousin sequester, in reporting on Capitol Hill budget negotiations, branding it esoteric jargon. That might be a good move, considering that, according to a recent poll, two-thirds of voters don’t even know what sequester means. How did we get saddled with this bit of Beltway lingo?

Would You Go on a Date with “Whomever” Has Good Grammar?
Feb. 15, 2013
In advance of Valentine’s Day, the dating site Match.com released some survey results indicating that good grammar is something that both men and women on the dating scene use to judge their potential mates. That finding led to a joke on Saturday Night Live that was supposed to illustrate “good grammar” but, ironically enough, failed to.

A “Steep Learning Curve” for “Downton Abbey”
Feb. 8, 2013
Last year, Season 2 of the popular British TV series “Downton Abbey” yielded a bumper crop of linguistic anachronisms. In Season 3, now airing stateside on PBS, the out-of-place language has continued. There was a particularly glaring anachronism in the most recently aired episode: “steep learning curve.”

When Life Imitates the Movies: From “Gaslighting” to “Catfishing”
Jan. 31, 2013
If you’ve been following the strange saga of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o, then you’ve likely come across the term “catfishing” to describe the type of prank he fell victim to, in which a romantic interest turns out to be nothing more than a fabricated online identity. The term comes from the 2010 documentary “Catfish,” but as I describe in my latest Boston Globe column, it’s not the first time that a cinematic depiction has spawned a new verb.

Obama’s Second Inaugural: Behind the Words
Jan. 22, 2013
The presidential inaugural address, that quadrennial high point in American political rhetoric, invariably attracts a huge amount of attention. President Obama’s address yesterday was the subject of meticulous scrutiny: his word choice, his rhetorical devices, and even his grammar all were analyzed by countless language kibitzers.

The Not-So-Fabulous “Phablet”
Jan. 11, 2013
Last week, the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year honors went to the Twitter-friendly hashtag. But another techie term emerged in a less prestigious category, Least Likely to Succeed. Finishing in a virtual tie with the much-maligned acronym YOLO was phablet, a blend of phone and tablet coined for new devices that are not quite smartphones and not quite tablet computers.

Tag, You’re It! “Hashtag” Wins as 2012 Word of the Year
Jan. 5, 2013
The American Dialect Society has selected its Word of the Year for 2012, and the winner was a bit of a surprise. It wasn’t fiscal cliff, the ubiquitous term in the news from Capitol Hill. And it wasn’t YOLO, the youthful acronym for “You Only Live Once” that quickly rose (and just as quickly fell) this past year. No, the ultimate champion was that mainstay of the Twittersphere, hashtag.

Presenting the Nominees for the 2012 Word of the Year
Jan. 4, 2013
At the American Dialect Society’s annual conference in Boston, we took a break from paper presentations to select nominations for the Word of the Year. As chair of the New Words Committee, I presided over the nominating session on Thursday. Winners will be selected from the different categories on Friday evening, culminating in the vote for the overall Word of the Year. Here’s the list of nominees.

“The Whole Nine Yards” Hits the Big Time
Dec. 27, 2012
How often do you see an article about the search for the origin of a phrase on the homepage of the New York Times website? Just about… never. And yet the Times today has a story about the history of an expression that we’ve delved into a couple of times in this space: “the whole nine yards.” Diligent word-sleuthing has turned up a rather unexpected predecessor: “the whole six yards.”

Two Hundred Years of “Uncle Sam”
Dec. 21, 2012
Americans are approaching an auspicious anniversary: it has been two hundred years since the first known appearance of “Uncle Sam” as an initialistic embodiment of the United States. The earliest example of “Uncle Sam” was found in the December 23, 1812 issue of the Bennington (Vermont) News-Letter. But another town not too far from Bennington — Troy, New York — has maintained that it is the true birthplace of Uncle Sam.

The Year in Words, 2012 Edition
Dec. 14, 2012
It’s that time again, the annual look back at the noteworthy words of the year. Were you worried about dangling over the fiscal cliff, or did you have more of a devil-may-care YOLO attitude? Were you more interested in mansplaining or hate-watching? Here’s a roundup of words that’s not just a bunch of malarkey.

The Language of “Lincoln”
Dec. 7, 2012
For my latest Boston Globe column, I talked to screenwriter Tony Kushner about how he crafted the dialogue for Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” I had been intrigued about Kushner’s script-writing process after hearing that he had consulted the Oxford English Dictionary to check any word that might have been inappropriate for the film’s 1865 setting. While the results of this painstaking work are admirable, it’s always possible to nitpick over possible anachronisms

From “Cyber Monday” to “Cyber Week”
Nov. 26, 2012
Retailers, not content with branding products, have lately taken to branding days of the week, as a way to hype the holiday shopping rush. “Black Friday,” the name for the day after Thanskgiving, was transformed from a negative to a positive by some clever etymological mythologizing (make that etymythologizing). Then the Monday after Thanksgiving was christened “Cyber Monday,” and now some marketers would like to extend that to a “Cyber Week.”

Falling Off the “Fiscal Cliff”
Nov. 16, 2012
Last February, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke warned the House of Representatives that “under current law, on January 1st, 2013, there is going to be a massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and tax increases.” Now, with the election over, President Obama and the lame-duck Congress are trying to figure out a way to avoid the “fiscal cliff.” But where did the phrase come from? And is the cliff metaphor really so apt?

Not So “Razor-Tight”
Nov. 7, 2012
In the leadup to President Obama’s win over Mitt Romney, a number of political commentators described the presidential race as not just “tight” but “razor-tight.” Ultimately, the razor-tight description was apt in such battleground states as Ohio, Florida, and Virginia, but not so much in the overall electoral results. But wait a minute: why razor-tight?

Blending the Candidates: “Robama” and “Obamney”
Oct. 25, 2012
In the third and final presidential debate, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama ended up agreeing on many foreign policy points. Despite all the heated rhetoric of the campaign, both candidates are making a play for undecided voters in the middle of the political spectrum. But for those who are disillusioned with the two-party system, Obama and Romney seem interchangeable: you might as well call them Robama and Obamney.

Sketching Out a “Sketchy Deal”
Oct. 17, 2012
In last night’s presidential debate, Barack Obama said that Mitt Romney’s economic plan amounted to a “sketchy deal.” Soon thereafter, #SketchyDeal was a trending topic on Twitter (in part thanks to the Obama campaign’s own Twitter account), used to question or criticize various aspects of Romney’s proposals. With sketchy in the spotlight, it’s worth sketching out how the word came to prominence, and how it can mean different things to different people.

Where Did Biden Get His “Bunch of Malarkey”?
Oct. 12, 2012
In last night’s vice-presidential debate, there was one clear winner: the word malarkey. Joe Biden used it not once but twice against Paul Ryan. First, in responding to Ryan’s criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of last month’s attacks in Benghazi, he told Ryan, “With all due respect, that’s a bunch of malarkey.” And then later, Biden euphemistically called Ryan’s rhetoric “a bunch of stuff” before clarifiying, “We Irish call it malarkey.”

Big Bird and the Wit of the Staircase
Oct. 5, 2012
The most memorable line in Wednesday night’s presidential debate, at least if social media is any indication, came when Mitt Romney vowed to cut funding to PBS but added, “I like PBS. I love Big Bird.” President Obama had a good comeback for the Big Bird line… except he delivered it a day later.

What’s the Matter with “Funness”?
Sept. 27, 2012
In my most recent column for the Boston Globe, I poke fun at new advertising slogans that Apple is using for its iPod line: the latest iPod Nano is “Completely Renanoed,” while the iPod Touch is “Engineered for Maximum Funness.” Whereas renanoed at least shows a modicum of creativity (turning Nano into a verb capable of taking the re- prefix), funness seems to be an unnecessarily cutesy elaboration on plain old fun. But hang on: can we make a distinction between fun and funness?

Emoticons at 30 (Or Is It 45? Or 125? Or 131?)
Sept. 21, 2012
This week, there have been many celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the emoticon, the now-ubiquitous use of punctuation marks to mark emotion in online text. On September 19, 1982, at 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posted a message to a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board, proposing that 🙂 be used for marking jokes and 🙁 for non-jokes. Though Fahlman should get full credit for these pioneering smiley and frowny faces, there were in fact much earlier pioneers in expressive typography.

Why is Everyone “Doubling Down”?
Sept. 14, 2012
If there’s one expression that seems to have taken over the media landscape lately, it’s “doubling down.” Deriving from the game of blackjack, “doubling down” has taken on a figurative meaning over the past couple of decades: “to engage in risky behavior, especially when one is already in a dangerous situation,” as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it. So why is everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Clinton talking about risk-taking in this way? And when is it considered a good thing?

Fixin’ to Get Folksy
Sept. 7, 2012
Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, in which he nominated President Obama for re-election, has been hailed as a rhetorical tour de force. The press corps marveled at how Clinton used the prepared speech as a mere starting point, injecting his remarks with ad-libbed folksiness. The result was a speech that managed to elucidate wonky policy specifics in the homespun style of a Southern preacher.

How Did the Proof Get in the Pudding?
Aug. 30, 2012
Last week on NPR’s Morning Edition, sports commentator Frank Deford said in a piece about Serena Williams and her volatile style that “the proof is in the pudding.” After a listener questioned the usage, I was called in to be the arbiter on the idiomatic expression. Is the proof in the pudding? Or is the proof of the pudding in the eating?

Further Adventures of YOLO
Aug. 27, 2012
Can a simple slangy acronym mark a generation gap? YOLO, short for “You Only Live Once,” has emerged as an age-based shibboleth: all too familiar to members of the millennial set, and all but meaningless to their elders. In my latest Boston Globe column, I dissect the YOLOphenomenon, but there’s much more to say about those four letters.

When New Words Reach a Tipping Point, It Can Be a Game Changer
Aug. 14, 2012
If there’s one thing that dictionary publishers have learned, it’s that announcing new words added to their latest editions is good for generating some media attention — and also generating public hand-wringing over what the new entries say about the state of our society and our language.

Of Hipsters, Hippies, and Hepcats
August 10, 2012
In two recent articles, The New York Times has reported on culture wars involving “hipsters”: locals in the Long Island town of Montauk are suffering from “hipster fatigue,” while in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the hipsters are battling with new parents and their babies. All of this raises the question: where did the term hipster come from? Does it have something to do with hippies? And what about the even older term, hepcat?

Stretching Out “The Whole Nine Yards
August 3, 2012
“The whole nine yards,” meaning “the full extent of something,” remains one of the most puzzling idioms for word-watchers. Everyone seems to have their own explanation for where the expression comes from, and yet there is still no definitive origin story for it. This is surprising for a phrase that’s not terribly old: scattered uses can be found from the 1960s, and now it’s been pushed back a bit earlier, to 1956.

How We Talk About “Other” Men and Women
July 26, 2012
Via Twitter, theatre director Jen Bender posed a question that had recently come up in conversation: “A married man’s lover is his mistress. What’s the name for a woman’s illicit lover?” Searching for an answer to that question points to the many gender-related asymmetries in English.

In Praise of the Rolling Stones and Their Zeugmoids
July 13, 2012
Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the first official performance of the Rolling Stones. When it comes to songwriting, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards usually don’t receive as much adulation as their counterparts in the Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. But Mick and Keith have churned out some wonderful turns of phrase over the past half century. Consider this, from the Stones’ 1969 single, “Honky Tonk Women”: “She blew my nose and then she blew my mind.”

Celebrating the Fourth with a “Parade of Horribles”
July 4, 2012
Hot dogs, fireworks, pie-eating contests… the Fourth of July is the same all around the United States, right? Not quite: some Independence Day traditions are more localized. Take “the parade of horribles,” a peculiar procession that you can find in various New England shore towns. Even more peculiarly, “the parade of horribles” has become a legal metaphor, one that made an appearance in the Supreme Court’s healthcare ruling last week.

“Monster In-Laws”: A Monstrous Usage?
June 22, 2012
Recently on Twitter, Amanda Pleva vented, “I guess I’m too much of a language nerd, but the title of the show ‘Monster In Laws’ makes me cringe every time I see it.” Amanda was referring to the reality show on the A&E Network, “Monster In-Laws,” which encourages viewers to “follow married couples dealing with meddling in-laws as they try to make peace with the help of an unconventional, no-nonsense relationship expert.” So is the title of the show a linguistic faux-pas?

The Battle over Defining “Marriage”
June 15, 2012
The word marriage has been the subject of a huge amount of political and legal wrangling, and dictionaries have lately been caught in the crossfire. With major English dictionaries expanding their definitions of marriage to encompass same-sex unions, lexicographers have taken hits from liberals and conservatives alike. Those opposed to same-sex marriage would prefer that dictionaries maintain the traditional definition, while those on the other side of the debate argue that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be treated as secondary. Lexicographers find themselves in a no-win situation.

2012 Spelling Bee: San Diego’s Snigdha Nandipati Wins a “Miracle”
June 1, 2012
In the 85th Scripps National Spelling Bee, the words were as diabolical as ever, but Snigdha Nandipati of San Diego, California took it all in stride. When it came time to spell the final word, guetapens, a French-derived word for “an ambush, snare, or trap,” she wasn’t snared by its strangeness and calmly spelled it correctly.

2012 Spelling Bee: 50 Survive the Preliminaries
May 31, 2012
The 85th Scripps National Spelling Bee kicked off yesterday, with 278 spellers getting whittled down to 50 semifinalists who will compete in the nationally televised action on Thursday. A precocious six-year-old didn’t make the cut, but an old friend of ours, Nicholas Rushlow of Pickerington, Ohio, will be back in the thick of it for his fifth consecutive year.

Backronym of the Week: “Ex-PATRIOT Act”
May 18, 2012
When news emerged that Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin was renouncing his American citizenship to avoid taxes related to Facebook’s IPO, two senators reacted by proposing legislation that would go after the likes of Saverin. Senators Chuck Schumer and Bob Casey said it was time to “defriend” Saverin, and they announced a bill called the Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy Act, or the Ex-PATRIOT Act for short.

Wild Words of Children’s Literature, from “Runcible” to “Rumpus”
May 11, 2012
This week has seen many encomiums to the great children’s book author Maurice Sendak, who died on Tuesday at the age of 83. As it happens, tomorrow marks the two hundredth birthday of one of Sendak’s predecessors in playful children’s literature: Edward Lear. That got me thinking about the grand tradition of wordplay in books for children, from Lear and Carroll to Seuss and Sendak.

It’s Getting “Meta” All the Time
May 7, 2012
This weekend I had the opportunity to ruminate about the self-consciously self-referential word meta for NPR’s “All Things Considered” and for my language column in the Sunday Boston Globe. That’s an awful lot of meta-commentary, but I’ve still got some more thoughts on meta, or make that meta-thoughts on meta.

Tracking Down the Roots of a “Super” Word
April 23, 2012
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. So many of us learned that outrageous mouthful of a word at an early age, when it was truly a verbal milestone to be able to pronounce it without getting tongue-tied. And just saying the word is an invitation to start singing the song from the classic 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins. But how did the word come to be? When I heard the news that one of the Mary Poppins songwriters passed away last month, I set about to answer that question, taking me down many unexpected alleyways of 20th-century popular culture.

Unsinkable Vocabulary: Words for the Titanic Centennial
Apr. 13, 2012
This weekend marks the one hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, so let’s commemorate the occasion by looking back on some words and phrases that were particularly associated with the maritime disaster.

On Opening Day, Remembering How Baseball Begat “Jazz”
Mar. 28, 2012
Today is opening day for Major League Baseball, though the only game on the schedule is in far-off Tokyo, where the Seattle Mariners and Oakland Athletics are beginning a two-game series. But let’s cast our minds back to opening day a century ago. On April 2, 1912, in a Pacific Coast League game between the Portland Beavers and the Los Angeles Angels, a pitcher uncorked his “jazz ball” — and possibly helped set into motion a chain of events that brought the word jazz together with the music it named.

(Mostly Human) Crossword Whizzes Head to Brooklyn
Mar. 16, 2012
This weekend, puzzlers will come together in Brooklyn for the 35th American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, organized by New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz. The reigning champ, Dan Feyer, has been described as a crossword-solving machine. But he better look out, because this time there will be competition from an actual crossword-solving machine.

“Meh”? “Fail”? GOP Debate Elicits Words of Disappointment
Feb. 23, 2012
Last night’s debate among the four remaining Republican presidential candidates in Arizona was clearly underwhelming for some political pundits. On the website BuzzFeed, Zeke Miller gave out grades to the candidates in the form of trendy online lingo favored by the site. Rick Santorum earned a “FAIL,” while Mitt Romney, despite being declared the winner, nonetheless was awarded a “MEH.”

The Lin-guistics of Lin-sanity
Feb. 17, 2012
In a mere two weeks, New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin has gone from an unknown to the most compelling story in sports. For basketball commentators, he’s been the gift that keeps on giving: turning in amazing performances night after night since coming off the bench and propelling the Knicks to a seven-game winning streak. His humble personal profile is in stark contrast to the over-the-top enthusiasm his play has generated, which goes by the buzzword (perhaps you’ve heard?) Linsanity.

“Downton Abbey”: Tracking the Anachronisms
Feb. 10, 2012
Are you hooked on “Downton Abbey”? The second season of the British period drama has been airing in the U.S. on PBS, and it’s been an addictive treat for Anglophiles. But just how accurate is the language used on the show? Though it mostly remains true to its post-Edwardian setting, at times the talk is a bit anachronistic.

“Not to Put Too Fine a Point Upon It”: How Dickens Helped Shape the Lexicon
Feb. 3, 2012
With the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens approaching (get your party hats ready for February 7th!), it’s a good time to gauge the enormous impact he had on the English language. By many accounts he was the most widely read author of the Victorian era, and no writer since has held a candle to him in terms of popularity, prolificness, and influence in spreading new forms of the language — both highbrow and lowbrow.

“Occupy” Named 2011 Word of the Year
Jan. 9, 2012
As the selection of the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year approached, a certain air of inevitability had begun to surround occupy, the word revitalized by the Occupy protest movement. And sure enough, when the assembled throngs met in Portland, Oregon, where the ADS held its annual meeting in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America, occupy emerged victorious as the Word of 2011.

Now Presenting: The Nominees for the 2011 Word of the Year
Jan. 6, 2012
Greetings from Portland, Oregon, where the American Dialect Society is having its annual conference. As chair of the New Words Committee, I had the honor of presiding over the nominating session for the Word of the Year. On Friday evening, winners will be selected from the different categories, and then nominations will be made for the overall category of Word of the Year. What do you think the category winners should be, and what should be crowned the Word of 2011?

Passing Away or Kicking the Bucket? The Lexicon of Dying
Dec. 22, 2011
Death has been in the news lately, with the passing of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il and former Czech president Vaclav Havel within hours of each other. Despite the very different legacies of the two world leaders, most English-language news outlets used the same wording to describe their deaths: in obituaries, both Kim and Havel simply died. But English, like many other world languages, has a rich vocabulary of terms for dying, from the blunt to the euphemistic.

The Year in Words, 2011 Edition
Dec. 15, 2011
Yes, it’s time for that annual tradition: picking the words and phrases that best define the past year. Did occupy occupy your attention? Were you talking about tiger moms or tiger blood? Or were you paralyzed by the condition known as FOMO (fear of missing out)?

Trump’s “Apprenti”: The Return of the Bogus Latin Plural
Dec. 9, 2011
Earlier this week, Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich emerged from a powwow with Donald Trump, and they had an announcement to make. Trump told reporters that, at Gingrich’s request, he was starting a program for disadvantaged New York schoolchildren, modeled on his competitive reality TV show “The Apprentice.” “We’re going to be picking ten young, wonderful children, and we’re going to make them apprenti,” Trump said. That’s right, he said apprenti.

The Origins of “Black Friday”
Nov. 25, 2011
Today is the day after Thanksgiving, when holiday shopping kicks off and sales-hunters are in full frenzy. The day has come to be known in the United States as “Black Friday,” and there are a number of myths about the origin of the name. Retailers would like you to believe that it’s the day when stores turn a profit on the year, thus “going into the black.” But don’t you believe it: the true origins come from traffic-weary police officers in Philadelphia in the early 1960s.

Down Under, Obama Has a “Chinwag”
Nov. 18, 2011
Visiting Australia earlier this week, President Obama broke the ice by injecting some Australian slang into his public speeches. He used a selection of Aussie-isms like chinwag and ear-bashing for comic effect, but it’s probably a good thing that he didn’t go overboard by trying to mimic a broad Australian English accent (often called “Strine”). British Prime Minister David Cameron, meanwhile, wasn’t so lucky: he got into some hot water for an ill-advised attempt at Strine.

Little Commas Make Big Waves
Nov. 11, 2011
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of taking part in a lively panel discussion entitled “More than a Century of Style,” celebrating The Chicago Manual of Style. The event, held at the University of Chicago and sponsored by the public radio station WBEZ, brought out more than two hundred committed stylistas, with hundreds more tuning in to a live stream on Facebook. Here’s an indication of the type of crowd that braved that rainy Chicago night: when University of Chicago Press managing editor Anita Samen announced that she was “passionately pro-serial-comma,” she was met with rapturous applause.

Tracking Dialects on Twitter: What’s Coo and What’s Koo?
Nov. 4, 2011
In last Sunday’s New York Times, I wrote about how researchers are using Twitter to build huge linguistic datasets in order to answer all sorts of interesting analytical questions. Some are looking at the emotional responses of Libyans to unfolding events like the death of Qaddafi, while others are tracking the distribution of regional patterns in American English. This latter research area, Twitter dialectology, is just getting off the ground, but the results are already quite intriguing.

David Henry Hwang Traverses the Language Barrier in “Chinglish”
Oct. 27, 2011
A new play is opening tonight on Broadway, and it’s a treat for language lovers. It’s called “Chinglish,” and it was written by David Henry Hwang, who won a Tony Award for “M. Butterfly.” I had a chance to talk to Hwang about his comic exploration of the perils of cross-linguistic misunderstanding.

Now Pitching in the World Series: The Man They Call “Scrabble”
Oct. 21, 2011
In this year’s World Series, one name in particular will likely catch the eye of even casual baseball fans. In the late innings of the first two games, a relief pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals came in to face the Texas Rangers: Marc Rzepczynski. The announcers were clearly ready for Rzepczynski’s appearance and pronounced his name smoothly (as “zep-CHIN-ski”), helpfully explaining that his nickname is “Scrabble.” So how does Rzepczynski stack up against other hard-to-spell baseball names?

Occupying Word Street
Oct. 14, 2011
The public protest over economic inequalities known as “Occupy Wall Street” has been going on nearly a month now, with the original demonstration in Manhattan’s Financial District spreading to cities around the world. Thanks to the success of the movement, the lingo of the protesters has spread quickly, with the verb occupy in particular becoming a kind of rallying cry.

“And One More Thing”: The Insanely Great Language of Steve Jobs
Oct. 7, 2011
After the passing of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs on Wednesday, the outpouring of sympathy on Twitter was overwhelming, with an estimated 10,000 tweets per second. Several of the top “trending topics” over the following day were Jobs-related, marked by the hashtags #ThankYouSteve, #iSad, #ThinkDifferent, and #StayHungry. Even in death, Jobs’s unique and spirited way with words was palpable.

The Art of the Self-Mocking Hashtag
Sept. 23, 2011
It’s fair to say that when it comes to online discourse we live in the Golden Age of Snark. (That’s snark as in “snide commentary,” not the imaginary animal of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark.”) When every statement you make is open to sarcastic rebuttals, sometimes the best policy is to ridicule yourself before someone else has the chance. Nowhere is this more true than Twitter, where the convention of the “hashtag” has been pressed into the service of self-mockery.

Word-Lore, Nerd-Lore
Sept. 16, 2011
To be called a nerd these days isn’t such a bad thing — it can even be a statement of pride, a way of owning up to an all-consuming passionate interest, particularly in something technological or pop-cultural (or both). It has been reclaimed as a positive label in much the same way as geek has. The cartoonish ’80s movie The Revenge of the Nerds turned out to have some prescience, as nerdy types from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg have come to rule so much of 21st-century life. So it’s only natural to wonder, where did the word nerd come from?

Taking Issue with “Ground Zero”
Sept. 9, 2011
In a speech on Tuesday anticipating the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that it was time to retire the name “Ground Zero” when referring to the World Trade Center site. “We will never forget the devastation of the area that came to be known as ‘Ground Zero,'” Bloomberg said. “But the time has come to call those 16 acres what they are: The World Trade Center and the National September 11th Memorial and Museum.” That’s quite a mouthful.

Temblor Shakes the East Coast (or Was it a Tremblor?)
Aug. 24, 2011
Yesterday, the east coast of the United States was struck by a 5.8-magnitude earthquake — or, as it was frequently described in news accounts, a “temblor.” Fortunately, the damage caused by the quake was limited, so instead we can contemplate the question: what the heck is a temblor? Or should the word be tremblor?

Flip-Flop Usage
Aug. 19, 2011
When I go on radio shows to talk about English language usage, talk inevitably turns to words and phrases that people find annoying. (The topic is sure to light up the call-in lines.) Among the top peeves I hear about are three expressions that get used in an inverted fashion: literally used non-literally to emphasize a figure of speech, irregardless used to mean regardless, and could care less used to mean couldn’t care less. What’s with all the flip-flopping?

“Downgrade” on the Upswing
Aug. 12, 2011
All this week, politicians and pundits have been busy reacting to Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the U.S. debt rating from AAA to AA+, the first such credit downgrade in American history. The word downgrade itself has taken on powerful significance, to the point that it has vaulted into contention for Word of the Year.

Nonplussed by Google Plus?
Aug. 5, 2011
Every technological advance brings with it new vocabulary, very often by taking old words and supplying new meanings. The age of social media has given us friending and unfriending, following and unfollowing, and so forth. Now Google’s foray into social networking, Google+, has introduced its own lingo: circles and hangouts, sparks and huddles. But with such a new system (Google+ is still in limited field trial), there’s naturally some initial confusion over basic terminology.

Does E-Mail Have Fingerprints?
July 28, 2011
In the Sunday Review section of the New York Times, I took a look at how forensic linguists try to determine the author of an e-mail by picking up on subtle clues of style and grammar. This is very much in the news, thanks to a lawsuit filed against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg by one Paul Ceglia, who claims that Zuckerberg promised him half of Facebook’s holdings, as proven by e-mail exchanges he says they had. Did Zuckerberg actually write the e-mails? Call the language detectives.

A Muggle’s View of Potter-Speak
July 15, 2011
With the final Harry Potter movie opening this weekend, many are reflecting on the last legacy of J.K. Rowling’s oeuvre. In print and on screen, the Harry Potter franchise has been incredibly successful, and it’s only natural that such a mass phenomenon would leave its imprint on popular culture, including the popular lexicon. Rowling’s inventive use of language has been a key to conjuring the fantasy world of the Potterverse, and that language has seeped into real-world usage as well.

High-Definition TV: Do Viewers Need Pop-Up Vocab Assistance?
July 5, 2011
If you were watching “This Week with Christiane Amanpour” on ABC Sunday morning, you saw a high-minded historical discussion of the U.S. Constitution. But you also might have caught an unusual media moment, when Amanpour, responding to Harvard University professor Jill Lepore, commented that Ben Franklin “was amazingly perspicacious when this Constitution was signed.” As Amanpour spoke, a graphic popped up on the screen giving a dictionary definition for the word perspicacious.

Early Words from the Campaign Trail
June 23, 2011
The 2012 presidential election is still well over a year away, but the campaign trail is already in full swing. On Tuesday, Jon Huntsman, Jr. threw his hat in the ring for the Republican nomination, adding his name to a list that already includes Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, and Herman Cain. (And that’s just the declared candidates.) The Republicans have been using some heated rhetoric toward President Obama, and toward each other. Here are some of the campaign’s early buzzwords.

Happy 50th, Webster’s Third!
June 17, 2011
Earlier this month, lexiphiles were glued to the Scripps National Spelling Bee, as Sukanya Roy of South Abington Township, Pennsylvania won a grueling 20-round contest. As the drama unfolded on national television, the viewing audience got to hear some incredibly obscure words, along with their definitions, all read aloud from a great American dictionary now celebrating its 50th anniversary.

2011 Spelling Bee: Sukanya Roy Wins a 20-Round Marathon
June 3, 2011
It took 20 grueling rounds, but Sukanya Roy of South Abington Township, Pennsylvania emerged victorious in the 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee. The 41 semifinalists had been whittled down to 13 for the prime-time finals, and the last handful of contestants kept the competition going with round after round of flawless spelling. Sukanya outlasted them all, winning with the word cymotrichous, meaning “having wavy hair.”

2011 Spelling Bee: The Fearless 41 Advance
June 2, 2011
The 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee got underway yesterday, as the 275 entrants faced the early rounds of spelling stumpers. Only 41 will advance to Thursday’s semifinal round, but we’re happy to report that two of them are familiar faces to us: Nicholas Rushlow and Tony Incorvati, both of Ohio, are returning spellers who have told us how they use the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee for practice. We wouldn’t want to play favorites, but, well… go Nicholas and Tony!

Code Name Watch: Obama the “Smart Alec”?
May 26, 2011
A few weeks ago, we reported on a mini-controversy stemming from the raid of Osama bin Laden, where the code name “Geronimo” was used. That drew the ire of some Native American groups who saw an unfortunate equivalence being drawn to a legendary warrior. Now we have a new code name controversy: for President Obama’s visit to the United Kingdom, Scotland Yard has used the code name “Chalaque,” which some newspapers have explained as a Punjabi word meaning “smart alec.”

Dylan the Prophesizer
May 24, 2011
Bob Dylan turns 70 today, and among the hosannas from his fellow musicians is this one from Emmylou Harris: “He changed the way we think about the English language.” Surely Dylan has vastly expanded the lyrical possibilities for songwriters who have followed in his wake, but his use of language has also left some more subtle fingerprints on the lexicon.

The “Arab Spring” Has Sprung
May 20, 2011
Yesterday, President Obama gave his much-anticipated “Arab spring” speech, setting out his foreign policy objectives in the Middle East in the wake of the revolutionary wave that has shook countries from Tunisia to Bahrain. But how did we come to call this moment in history the “Arab spring,” considering that the Tunisian protests that got the ball rolling started way back in December?

“Hot Dog”: The Untold Story
May 13, 2011
Hot dog. This all-American food term has long been shrouded in mystery, with many competing theories for its origin. But new research points to intriguing early evidence from an unexpected source, in the city of Paterson in New Jersey. Most intriguing of all, the original “hot dog man” may have been a Jamaican-born, German-speaking former circus strong man who plied his wares in Paterson in the late nineteenth century.

The “Geronimo” Code Name Controversy
May 6, 2011
One of the more unforeseen outcomes of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound is a controversy over a code name used during the mission: Geronimo. Native American groups have protested the use of the code name as a denigration of a heroic historical figure, by equating him with a modern-day terrorist and mass murderer. Strong opinions on the topic were voiced yesterday at a Senate Indian Affairs committee hearing on combating Native American stereotypes. It’s the latest unusual chapter in the long history of the name Geronimo.

Royally Speaking
Apr. 29, 2011
Much of the media narrative leading up to today’s wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton has focused on Kate’s “commoner” background, particularly her mother’s family, hailing from the humble coal-mining country of northern England. In class-conscious British society, differences in social background come through in speech patterns — as anyone who’s seen “My Fair Lady” knows. So how have the royal family and the middle-class Middletons navigated this tricky linguistic terrain?

Eco-Speak: An Earth Day Glossary
Apr. 22, 2011
Today is Earth Day, the annual celebration launched 41 years ago to raise environmental awareness. What better time to get up to speed with the latest in “green” lingo? Here are ten eco-friendly words that have gained prominence over the last few years.

Mass Confusion?
Apr. 15, 2011
It’s not every day that an obscure word like consubstantial becomes a topic of hot debate. But this week The New York Times reported that a new English translation of the liturgy used for the Roman Catholic Mass is prompting complaints about the difficulty of the revised language, and consubstantial is Exhibit Number One for the critics.

The Pitcher with a Thesaurus in His Locker
Apr. 8, 2011
The baseball season is in full swing now, and as a long-suffering fan of the New York Mets, I’ve learned to content myself with the small pleasures of the game. The Mets started the season with a road trip, going 3-3 — not bad, I’ll take it. Pitching in today’s home opener at Citi Field is R.A. Dickey, who has emerged as a fan favorite, not just for his way with a knuckleball, but for his way with words.

Gain’s “Gooder” Galls Grammar Grouches
Mar. 31, 2011
A television commercial for the laundry detergent Gain is getting under the skin of the grammatically minded. The commercial shows a man getting dressed and smelling his newly laundered shirt, as the announcer says, “Bill’s mornings have never been gooder thanks to something amazing we’ve added to Gain.” That one little word, gooder, has set off a storm of protests — which may be exactly what Procter & Gamble, the makers of Gain, are looking for.

How We Got an “App” For That
Mar. 24, 2011
When the American Dialect Society selected app as the 2010 Word of the Year, it was a nod to the tech term’s sudden ubiquity over the past year or two. And now it’s more contested than ever with Apple locked in litigation with two rivals, Microsoft and Amazon, in an attempt to hold on to a trademark for app store. How did we get to the point where, as the Apple slogan goes, “there’s an app for that” (regardless of whose store you buy it from)?

Back to Brooklyn: It’s Puzzlin’ Time!
Mar. 18, 2011
This weekend, the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott will once again host the 34th American Crossword Puzzle Tournament — the premier annual gathering of word nerds. Presided over by New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz, the ACPT promises to provide just as much competitive drama as past years.

Alteration We Can Believe In?
Mar. 11, 2011
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Obama administration is “urging protesters from Bahrain to Morocco to work with existing rulers toward what some officials and diplomats are now calling ‘regime alteration.'” That sounds like a kinder, gentler version of regime change, which itself has a euphemistic ring to it. If President Obama came into office riding a wave of change, why is that word suddenly problematic?

“Winning” Words: The Language of Sheenenfreude
Mar. 4, 2011
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you’ve witnessed the spectacular media meltdown of Charlie Sheen unfold before your eyes. The endless stream of over-the-top pronouncements in Sheen’s recent interviews has been captivating, and Sheenisms have quickly become inescapable online, especially on Twitter (where Sheen managed to attract a million followers in just over 24 hours). Tiger blood and Adonis DNA. Rock star from Mars. Gnarly gnarlingtons. Vatican assassin warlocks. And, of course, winning, the buzzword to beat them all. Does any of Sheen’s frenetic verbiage have a chance of being remembered beyond the current moment of celebrity Schadenfreude, or should I say Sheenenfreude?

How Watson Trounced the Humans
Feb. 17, 2011
The field of natural language processing doesn’t usually get showcased in a widely watched game show, but that’s exactly what happened on Jeopardy! over the last three evenings, as IBM’s Watson supercomputer squared off against the two best humans ever to play the game. IBM had sunk tens of millions of dollars in research money to develop Watson over the past four years, and a loss would have been highly embarrassing. Luckily for IBM, and unluckily for the carbon-based life forms Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Watson came through with flying colors.

Playing with Language, Egyptian Style
Feb. 11, 2011
This weekend, instead of an “On Language” column in The New York Times Magazine, I’ll be contributing a piece to the Times‘s Week in Review section, on how Egyptian protesters have been playing with language to make their case that President Hosni Mubarak must go. (Given his defiant “non-resignation” speech Thursday night, he’s not taking the hint.) Though most of the wordplay in the protests is in Arabic, a surprising amount is in English.

Choice Words from the State of the Union
Jan. 27, 2011
Tuesday night’s State of the Union address by President Obama provided a fresh round of political phrase-making. As members of Congress went on a bipartisan date night, Obama called for investments to win the future and meet our Sputnik moment by doing big things. Here’s a look at some of the memorable words and phrases that came out of the speech.

When Autocorrect is Not So Correct
Jan. 14, 2011
My latest On Language column for The New York Times Magazine explores a topic that any owner of smartphone knows too well: the often bizarre behavior of autocorrect, which can “miscorrect” what you type into unexpected and outrageous output.

“App” Wins as 2010 Word of the Year
Jan. 10, 2011
Once again the American Dialect Society has performed its not-so-solemn duty in anointing a Word of the Year (aka WOTY), and the 2010 winner is app, as in, “There’s an app for that.” I’m just back from Pittsburgh, where the ADS held its annual meeting in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America, and I’ve got the full report.

The 2010 Words of the Year: And the Nominees Are…
Jan. 7, 2011
Greetings from chilly Pittsburgh! The American Dialect Society is having its annual conference here, and last night we met to select the nominees for various categories of Words of the Year. On Friday evening, winners will be selected from the different categories, and then nominations will be made for the overall category of Word of the Year. What do you think the category winners should be, and what should be crowned the Word of 2010?

What’s the Word of 2010?
Dec. 17, 2010
As 2010 winds down, word-watchers are reflecting on a year of vuvuzelas and robo-signers, gleeks and mama grizzlies. Let’s take a look back at some of the lexical highlights from the past year.

How the King Overcame His Stutter
Dec. 10, 2010
This weekend, the movie “The King’s Speech” gets its nationwide release in the United States, and it’s already getting talked about as a front-runner for the Oscars. It has also received a great deal of buzz in the speech therapy community for its sensitive and credible depiction of King George VI’s speech impediment and the methods that his therapist Lionel Logue used to overcome it. I take a look at the movie and the real-life story in my latest On Language column, appearing in the Oscars issue of the New York Times Magazine.

The Double Life of “Sanction”
Nov. 29, 2010
Sarah Palin’s political opponents made hay out of her gaffe last Wednesday, when she said on Glenn Beck’s radio show that “We gotta stand with our North Korean allies,” when she meant “South Korean allies.” Palin fought back with a Thanksgiving Facebook message that pointed to numerous slips of the tongue by President Obama. I don’t find her “North Korean” error particularly remarkable (she was swiftly corrected by Beck, and she didn’t confuse North and South Korea elsewhere in her remarks). I was more interested in what she said before that: “We’re not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do.” Was her use of sanction also erroneous?

A Brief History of the “Pat-Down”
Nov. 23, 2010
The outrage over new security procedures enforced by the Transportation Security Administration has thrust the word pat-down into the news. Airline passenger screenings in the U.S. now involve full-body scans, or if the passenger refuses the scan, a full-body pat-down. While the TSA faces backlash against these so-called “enhanced pat-downs” (an unfortunate term reminiscent of “enhanced interrogation techniques” at Guantanamo), plain-old pat-downs have been part of the lexicon of law enforcement for decades.

“Get Your Geek On” at Public Libraries
Nov. 19, 2010
There’s a new campaign to boost awareness of U.S. public libraries that goes by the curious name, “Geek the Library.” I’m all for the campaign’s stated mission of improving public perceptions of libraries by championing their importance to local communities. But what really fascinates me is the way they’re using geek as a transitive verb to mean “be geekily enthusiastic about.” I guess you could say I geek innovative uses of the word geek.

“The Web” at 20
Nov. 12, 2010
Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau authored the proposal that launched “the World Wide Web,” and the English language has never been the same. In my On Language column for The New York Times Magazine this Sunday, I take a look back at the inception of “the Web” and its many linguistic offspring over the years. As a master metaphor for our online age, the gossamer Web has proved remarkably resilient

The Story Behind Obama’s “Shellacking”
Nov. 5, 2010
Four years ago, when then-President George W. Bush surveyed the losses suffered by congressional Republicans in the midterm elections, he memorably called it a “thumping.” On Wednesday, President Obama used a similarly colorful term to describe his party’s electoral woes. “I’m not recommending for every future President that they take a shellacking like I did last night,” he said at his press conference. That comment led many to wonder, how did shellacking come to describe a thorough defeat?

“Man Up” Gets Political
Oct. 22, 2010
When I wrote an On Language column in the New York Times Magazine last month about the rise in popularity of the expression “man up,” little did I know that it would turn into one of the key catchphrases of American political discourse in advance of November’s midterm elections.

“Truthiness”: The Silly Word that Feels Wrong in Your Mouth
Oct. 15, 2010
This Sunday marks the fifth anniversary of the premiere episode of “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert’s endlessly entertaining sendup of political pundit programs. On that episode, Colbert introduced the word “truthiness,” which has proved so popular that it has entered the latest edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary. For my On Language column in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, I had the pleasure of interviewing Colbert (as himself, not his put-upon persona) and learned the inside story of “truthiness.” Here is an extended excerpt from our conversation.

Just Say No to Nosism!
Oct. 8, 2010
Last Sunday I wrote an On Language column for The New York Times Magazine about the editorial we, and all the sarcastic jokes that have been made about the presumptuous pronoun. “Nameless authors of editorials may find the pronoun we handy for representing the voice of collective wisdom,” I wrote, “but their word choice opens them up to charges of gutlessness and self-importance.” Since the column appeared, some of those voices of collective wisdom have risen to defend themselves.

Buzzword Watch: “Acq-hire”
Sept. 28, 2010
Earlier this month, a post by Dan Frommer on Business Insider had this to say about Google, Facebook and Apple: “Recently, all three companies have been making a lot of ‘acq-hires,’ where they buy a company to acquire its human resources.” You read that right: acq-hire. Where did this odd word come from?

All Aboard the “Chunking” Express
Sept. 20, 2010
This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine was a special issue on education, with a focus on education technology. I used the opportunity to write an On Language column that explored new theoretical approaches to language learning that are having important practical applications in the English-language classroom.

Torn Limn from Limn
Sept. 10, 2010
The Baltimore Sun raised a ruckus among its readers by printing a certain four-letter word in a front-page headline on Tuesday. Here is the offending headline:

Opposing votes limn differences in race

Limn (pronounced like “limb”) means “trace the shape of,” “make a portrait of,” or simply “describe.” It isn’t a word you see every day in newspaper headlines, and that bothered some Baltimoreans.

“Man Up” and Other Uplifting Imperatives
Sept. 6, 2010
My latest On Language column for The New York Times digs into the currently popular words of instruction, “Man up!” How you interpret it has a lot to do with what exactly you think it means to be a man. As I write in the column, it can mean anything from “Don’t be a sissy; toughen up” to “Do the right thing; be a mensch.” But the up is just as important as the man, since it connects the expression to a family of imperatives of the “X up” variety, many having to do with accepting responsibility for one’s actions.

The Origins of Text-Speak, from 1828?
Aug. 20, 2010
A new exhibit at the British Library on the evolution of English will feature some linguistic play that presages the age of “text-speak.” As reported by The Guardian, the exhibit will display a comic poem printed in 1867 with lines like “I wrote 2 U B 4” (“I wrote to you before”). I’ve investigated this proto-text-speak and have found similar versified examples going all the way back to 1828.

“Mad Men” Word Watch: Get Over It!
Aug. 18, 2010
Ever since I wrote an On Language column for the New York Times Magazine about the authenticity of the dialogue on the AMC series “Mad Men,” my inbox has been full of questions about words and phrases that have appeared on the show. The most recent episode, set in early 1965, was particularly rich in expressions that set off people’s linguistic radar. Here I’ll take a look at four questionable examples from the episode.

Slaterisms: Have You Ever Wanted to “Hit the Slide”?
Aug. 12, 2010
The JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater became an overnight folk hero after news spread of his theatrical resignation: cursing out a passenger over the intercom, grabbing a beer, deploying the plane’s emergency slide, and sliding down to the tarmac in a blaze of glory. With a story so compelling, it’s no surprise that admirers are now coming up with Slater-specific expressions to describe “take this job and shove it” moments.

Dan Brown Lexicography: “Secret Vault of Non-Words!”
Aug. 10, 2010
A lot of silly things get written about the craft of dictionary-making, but a story that appeared last week in the London-based Daily Telegraph just might be the most nonsensical article about lexicography in recent memory. The breathless headline reads, “Secret vault of words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered.” What a scoop! Has the Telegraph blown the lid off a cabal of Dictionary Illuminati worthy of a Dan Brown novel? Yeah, not so much.

Bennies and Shoobies and Caspers, Oh My!
Aug. 6, 2010
With everybody heading out to the beach this summer, my latest On Language column for The New York Times Magazine looks at the local lingo of shore towns. Beach-related regionalisms can get quite colorful, especially when it comes to epithets for the seasonal hordes of visitors.

In Defense of Harding the Bloviator
July 29, 2010
During my appearance on WNYC’s “The Leonard Lopate Show” yesterday to talk about Sarah Palin’s much-ridiculed use of the word refudiate, I found myself in the odd position of defending Warren Gamaliel Harding, one of the least admired presidents in American history. In the commentary on Palin, Harding was revived as a point of comparison, particularly for his use of two memorable words: normalcy and bloviate. As I said on the show, I’d argue that Harding has gotten a bad rap on both counts.

“Refudiate” and Other Accidental Coinages
July 27, 2010
The dust has settled a bit since last week’s Refudiate-Gate, when the blogosphere went into a tizzy after Sarah Palin used the word refudiate in a Twitter update — and then defended her coinage by likening herself to Shakespeare. Now that we’ve gotten the predictably overheated reactions from the left and the right out of the way, let’s take a look at this particular Palinism with a calmer perspective.

“Mad Men”: Capturing the Sound of the ’60s
July 22, 2010
Just in time for Sunday’s season premiere of “Mad Men,” my latest “On Language” column in The New York Times Magazine considers how authentically the show represents the speech of the 1960s. The creators of the show, led by head honcho Matthew Weiner, are obsessive about getting the details of language right, just like all the other details of the show. But fans can be equally obsessive, on the lookout for the smallest linguistic anachronisms.

Are the Kids “Alright” or “All Right”?
July 20, 2010
The new film The Kids Are All Right, directed by Lisa Cholodenko, owes an obvious debt of gratitude to The Who, even though the band’s music doesn’t appear on the soundtrack. The title is lifted from a classic song from The Who’s 1965 debut album, which also served as the title of a 1979 documentary about the band. Discerning readers will notice a small but important difference: the song and the documentary were spelled “The Kids Are Alright.” Did Cholodenko “correct” The Who’s spelling?

Remembering “The Voice of God”
July 16, 2010
A great voice was silenced earlier this week with the death of Bob Sheppard, longtime public-address announcer for New York Yankees baseball games and New York Giants football games. Sheppard, who also worked as a speech teacher at the high school and college level in New York, had such a memorable way of announcing players’ names that he was fondly known as “the voice of God.”

Meet the Dinosaur with “Mojo”
July 13, 2010
What happens when paleontologists get together for drinks and brainstorm for names of dinosaur species? They come up with Mojoceratops, inspired by the mystical, magical mojo. And with the publication of a paper in the Journal of Paleontology this week, the name is official.

Rocking the English Language
July 9, 2010
The latest quarterly update of the Oxford English Dictionary’s online revision project covers the alphabetical range Rh to rococoesque, and it includes a fascinatingly complex entry for a seemingly simple word: rock, used as a verb. From the rocking of cradles in Old English sources to the rocking of microphones in rap lyrics, this entry has it all.

The Manute Bol Theory of “My Bad”
June 22, 2010
After former NBA star Manute Bol died over the weekend, tributes in the sports pages recognized his awesome shot-blocking skills (it helped that he was 7-foot-7) and his equally awesome humanitarian work in his native Sudan. Another frequently cited legacy is that Bol popularized (or even coined) the expression “my bad” as an athletic mea culpa. On the ESPN gabfest “Around the Horn,” Bill Plaschke even said of the supposed coinage, “Language experts have pretty much proven this.” Let’s investigate.

Let’s Prepone the Tiffin: I Have to Air-Dash!
June 8, 2010
Last Sunday I responded to an intriguing question from a reader of the New York Times Magazine “On Language” column, dealing with a meaning of the word revert that was previously unfamiliar to me. As I discovered, revert can mean “reply” in a number of varieties of world English, particularly the English of the Indian subcontinent. But revert is hardly the only English word that has moved on a special trajectory in Indian English.

2010 Spelling Bee: Three Cheers for Anamika!
June 5, 2010
At the end of the 2010 Scripps National Spelling Bee, 14-year-old Anamika Veeramani of North Royalton, Ohio stood alone as the champion. Anamika, who tied for fifth in last year’s National Bee, showed poise throughout the competition as one contestant after another fell by the wayside. Though her ride was mostly smooth, the Spelling Bee itself saw some controversy.

2010 Spelling Bee: On to the Semifinals!
June 4, 2010
After the first day of competition at the 2010 Scripps National Spelling Bee, the field of 273 contestants has been winnowed down to 48, who will move on to Friday’s semifinal round. They’ll all be looking to follow in the path of last year’s winner, Kavya Shivashankar. As usual, the preliminary rounds featured some fascinatingly obscure words, from famulus (a close attendant, as to a scholar) to nullipara (a woman who has never given birth to a child).

When “Cool” Got Cool
May 27, 2010
It’s hard to imagine the English language without the word cool as a colloquial description of someone or something first-rate. Over the past half-century of usage, the word has become so omnipresent that it has lost much of its slangy patina. Slang-watcher Connie Eble noted here that when she asks her students at the University of North Carolina to list items of slang, they don’t even think of cool, since “it’s just ordinary vocabulary for them.” How did cool first break through to the mainstream?

Of Fanboys and FANBOYS
May 19, 2010
On the tech site Technologizer, Harry McCracken has provided a lovingly detailed history of the term fanboy, as it traveled from the world of underground comics to become “the tech world’s favorite put-down.” It got me thinking about the development of the mnemonic aid FANBOYS, which every English composition teacher knows is an acronym for the coordinating conjunctions for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so.

Beware of Quants with Fat Fingers
May 14, 2010
During the global economic crisis of the last few years, previously esoteric financial jargon has worked its way into public discourse. One such term is quant, a shorthand term for “quantitative analyst.” They’re the subject of Scott Patterson’s new book, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It, and I take on the term in my latest On Language column in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. It’s a timely topic, given the mysterious 1,000-point dip in the Dow Jones index last week, variously blamed on quants and “fat fingers.”

Counting E-mails (and Spams)
May 7, 2010
With new technology comes new language, and with new language comes new usage conundrums. Here’s a question that people have been puzzling over for a couple of decades now: if we don’t pluralize mail as mails, why should we pluralize e-mail as e-mails?

Watch Out for Etymythology!
April 30, 2010
Say you’re reading the “About” page on a company’s website, and they tell a little story about how they came up with a common word long ago, perhaps as part of an early advertising campaign or in the creation of a consumer product. Should you believe the story? Don’t count on it! That’s the lesson of my latest On Language column in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, exploring the tricky terrain of corporate etymology — or rather, etymythology.

Two Captain on the Porches, Please…
April 20, 2010
This past weekend I was pleased to take part in the annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society, held this year in Philadelphia. I was on a lively panel entitled “Your Grammar Questions Answered,” with Merrill Perlman, who managed the copy desks at The New York Times for many years, and Bill Walsh, multiplatform editor for The Washington Post. For an hour and half, the ACES crowd peppered us with all manner of grammar questions, from the well-worn to the unexpected.

Here’s to Your Wellness
April 16, 2010
For this Sunday’s “Health and Wellness” issue of The New York Times Magazine, I’ve contributed an “On Language” column looking at how we all started talking about wellness (as opposed to health) in the first place. The word has had an odd trajectory: from an occasional antonym of illness dating back to the 17th century, to an uneasy label for preventive and holistic approaches to health in the ’70s and ’80s, to an established element of our linguistic landscape in the ’90s and beyond.

Getting “Social”
April 2, 2010
In this Sunday’s “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine, I take on some modern meanings of social and related words like socialize. (Have you been in a meeting where someone has suggested socializing an idea?) We owe much of the recent rise of social-ity to those trendy online terms, social media and social networking. How did we manage to get so social simply by staring into our laptop screens?

Stay Tuned for Language Mavenry
March 19, 2010
It’s been a whirlwind week since the official announcement that I would be taking over the “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine, the old stomping grounds of the late lamented Language Maven, William Safire. I’m grateful for all of the warm messages of congratulation I’ve received, and I also remain cognizant that in taking over Safire’s column, I have extremely big shoes to fill.

“Kanye”: Rebirth of an Eponym
March 10, 2010
If you watched the Oscars on Sunday, like many other viewers you were probably left scratching your head when, after “Music by Prudence” won for Best Documentary Short, there was a struggle for the microphone between two of the film’s creators. Elinor Burkett snatched the microphone from Roger Ross Williams, in what was almost immediately dubbed a “Kanye moment.” Or you could say Burkett “pulled a Kanye,” or that Williams simply got “Kanye’d.”

At the Movies: Plumbing the Depths of “The Hurt Locker”
March 5, 2010
One of the frontrunners for Best Picture in Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony is Kathryn Bigelow’s tense depiction of a U.S. bomb squad unit in Iraq, The Hurt Locker. The movie’s official website says of the title, “In Iraq, it is soldier vernacular to speak of explosions as sending you to ‘the hurt locker.'” In fact, like so much American military slang, hurt locker (along with related hurt expressions) dates back to the Vietnam War.

Bridge That Gap!
March 2, 2010
During President Obama’s health care summit last week, Republican House Whip Eric Cantor suffered a bit of a misspeak, saying: “We have a very difficult bridge to gap here.” Whoops! It’s the gap that needs bridging, of course, not vice versa.

Owning the Podium (and the Lectern)
February 25, 2010
An oft-heard word of the Winter Olympics is podium, the raised platform where medalists stand. As I wrote about recently for The New York Times Magazine, during the Olympics podium even gets used as a verb, as in “The Canadian alpine skiers failed to podium.” The verbing of podium bothers a lot of people, but the noun presents problems too. Away from the Olympics, podium often gets conflated with another word, lectern.

Crossword Tournament 2010: Dan Feyer Wins!
February 22, 2010
The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament has come to an end, and with it the end of Tyler Hinman’s amazing five-year reign as champ. Meet the new alpha dog of the crossword world: the one and only Dan Feyer. Puzzlemaster Brendan Emmett Quigley joins us again with his wrap-up of the action from Brooklyn.

Crossword Tournament 2010: Saturday Report
February 21, 2010
Live from Brooklyn, puzzlemaster Brendan Emmett Quigley is providing exclusive commentary from the 2010 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Brendan’s got the scoop on all the action at the end of the first day of competition.

It’s Crossword Time Again!
February 19, 2010
It’s time once again for the cream of the crosswording crop to converge on the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Brooklyn, New York. Last year the nail-biting final round saw Tyler Hinman emerge victorious for the fifth consecutive year (his thrilling first win was captured in the documentary Wordplay). Will Tyler manage to pull off #6, or is it time for a new winner — like, say, last year’s breakout star Dan Feyer?

SnOMG! It’s Snowmageddon 2010
February 11, 2010
Over the last few days, America’s Eastern seaboard has seen record levels of snow… accompanied by record levels of snow wordplay. There has been a blizzard of “portmanteau words” involving snow, with snowmageddon and snowpocalypse leading the way. On Twitter, the hashtag of choice has been snOMG, compactly joining snow with the online interjection OMG. We haven’t seen this much seasonal word-blending since 2008’s “summer of the staycation.”

The Legend of Cary Grant’s Telegram
February 4, 2010
After writing about “crash blossoms” in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, I’ve gotten plenty of responses from readers sending in their own favorite examples of unintentionally ambiguous headlines. I’ve also been hearing more about an anecdote I mentioned, relating to a legendary telegram long attributed to Cary Grant.

Crash Blossoms Keep on Blossoming
February 2, 2010
My latest On Language column in the New York Times Magazine is all about “crash blossoms,” a new term for a phenomenon that people have been noting for decades: newspaper headlines that can be read in unintended ways (like “British Left Waffles on Falklands”). I’ve already received a plethora of emails from readers who wanted to share crash blossoms that they’ve collected over the years.

Googling vs. Bing-ing
January 22, 2010
When google, a verb meaning “to search the Internet,” was chosen by the American Dialect Society as Word of the Decade (2000-09), my ADS colleague Grant Barrett wondered whether Google’s trademark lawyers might have preferred it if the runner-up, blog, had won instead. It is of course a tribute to the vast popularity of Google that it has become accepted as a generic verb for online searching, but the protectors of the trademark wouldn’t necessarily see it that way. Meanwhile, Microsoft, creators of the rival search engine Bing, would very much like people to use their brand name as a verb.

“Sleeping Beauties” in English and Dutch
January 20, 2010
When the New Oxford American Dictionary selected unfriend as its 2009 Word of the Year, Oxford University Press senior lexicographer Christine Lindberg was quick to point out that the verb long predates the Facebook era. As she explained in an NPR interview, the Oxford English Dictionary has a citation for unfriend from 1659. “I think it’s a remarkable resurrection,” Lindberg told NPR. “In a way, I look at unfriend as the Sleeping Beauty of 2009 words.” Now it appears that the Dutch language has its own Sleeping Beauty… or should that be Rip Van Winkle?

“Team Conan”: The Latest Pop-Culture Posse
January 13, 2010
In the newest chapter of the late-night television wars, “Tonight Show” host Conan O’Brien has announced that he won’t go along with NBC’s plan to bump his show to a midnight time slot to make way for Jay Leno at 11:30. After O’Brien made his announcement, he was the recipient of an immediate outpouring of support online. Thousands joined the Team Conan Facebook group, while thousands more expressed their allegiance on Twitter using the #TeamConan hashtag. Where did all this “Team” talk come from?

“Tweet” Named Word of the Year, “Google” Word of the Decade
January 9, 2010
After much good-natured debate at its annual meeting in Baltimore, the American Dialect Society has made its selections for Word of the Year and Word of the Decade. As proof that we’re truly living in a digital age, the winner of Word of the Year for 2009 was tweet (“to post an update on Twitter”) and the Word of the Decade for 2000-09 was google (the generic verb meaning “to use Google or another search engine”).

The American Dialect Society’s “Word of the Year” Nominees
January 8, 2010
Greetings from Baltimore, where the American Dialect Society is holding its annual conference. Along with scholarly presentations about American linguistic varieties, the ADS is also making selections for Word of the Year (2009) and Word of the Decade (2000-09). ADS members fixed on a final list of nominees for the different categories that will be up for a vote on Friday.

The Origins of “Eggnog,” Holiday Grog
December 24, 2009
Is there any drink more seasonal than eggnog, that Yuletide mixture of sweetened milk, beaten eggs, and (at least traditionally) liquor? As we head into the peak time for eggnog consumption, let’s put aside our mugs and stop to consider where the word eggnog actually comes from.

A New Political Eponym Barges in
December 15, 2009
This time last year, David Letterman was making jokes about Blagojeviching, playing on the name of disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Now we’ve got a brand-new political eponym on our hands: Salahi is being used as a verb meaning “to gate-crash an official event.”

At the Movies: “Airworld,” “Unobtainium”
December 9, 2009
The end-of-the-year movie rush is upon us, when the studios roll out their high-prestige projects. I’ve been thinking about words related to two major movies of the season: Up in the Air (now in theaters), adapted from the novel of the same name by Walter Kirn, and Avatar (coming soon!), the sci-fi extravaganza from James Cameron of Titanic fame.

Are You Esurient for New Words?
December 2, 2009
A couple of weeks ago, Merriam-Webster announced their top words of 2009 based on the intensity of lookups to its online dictionary and thesaurus. Now Dictionary.com has their own announcement of the most looked-up words of the past year. Though the main list is full of usual suspects like affect and effect (perennial stumpers even for native English speakers), the “top gainer” is a very unusual word: esurient, meaning ‘extremely hungry; desirous; greedy.’ What might explain the ravenous interest in this obscure term?

Is There a Problem with “No Problem”?
November 30, 2009
Visual Thesaurus subscriber “Curious Cat” has struck a nerve. Commenting on a Word Routes column last month about annoying words, “CC” wrote: My bugbear: “No problem” in response to “Thank you” in restaurants. “You’re welcome” is disappearing in this context. I assume that my business is not a problem.

Going Quant, Going Rogue
November 24, 2009
When I read in the New York Times recently that everyone is going quant in “the Age of Metrics,” my first thought was, “Is that anything like Sarah Palin going rogue?” What’s going on with these new ways of going, anyhow?

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year: “Admonish”
November 20, 2009
The latest selection for 2009 Word of the Year comes from the good people at Merriam-Webster. Unlike other dictionary publishers that anoint an annual word, Merriam-Webster bases its winner and runners-up on actual user lookups to its online dictionary and thesaurus. So instead of the novelties selected by its competitors (distracted driving from Webster’s New World, unfriend from New Oxford American), Merriam-Webster’s choice is an old word that worked its way into current events: admonish.

NOAD Word of the Year: “Unfriend”
November 17, 2009
The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced its Word of the Year for 2009: it’s unfriend, defined as “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.” Readers of this space will be quite familiar with the term, as I discussed it along with similar un-verbs on Word Routes in May and then again in September as a followup to my On Language column in the New York Times Magazine, “The Age of Undoing.” It’s nice to feel ahead of the curve on this one, but truth be told, unfriending has been going on for many years.

Happy Web Day!
November 12, 2009
November 12th isn’t a public holiday, but perhaps it should be. On this day in 1990, a memorandum was produced by the English physicist Tim Berners-Lee and the Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau while working for CERN in Geneva. Entitled “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project,” it might not have seemed so earth-shattering at the time. But it set into motion the Age of the Web: it’s hard to overestimate the impact this document has had on our chronically wired culture — and on our language.

It’s Cadillac Time!
November 6, 2009
In this Sunday’s “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine, I take a look at how the car brand Cadillac remains an emblem of luxury, even though Cadillac itself is no longer really “the Cadillac of cars.” In the health care debate on Capitol Hill, we frequently hear high-cost health insurance plans described as “Cadillac plans.” And there’s another area of American culture where Cadillac continues to have outsized linguistic importance: baseball.

Hyping Hypallage
November 3, 2009
Leave it to lexicographers to sneak a word like hypallage into a press release. The occasion is the Word of the Year from Webster’s New World Dictionary (yes, it’s Word of the Year season already). Webster’s New World chose distracted driving as its Word of the Year for 2009, defined as “use of a cellphone or other portable electronic device while operating a motor vehicle.” The press release notes that distracted driving features a “linguistic catch” that is “frequently seen in poetry”: hypallage. Say what?

Beware the Colophon! The Return of the Literary Spelling Bee
October 27, 2009
For the second year in a row, the Visual Thesaurus helped out the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses with its annual Spelling Bee to support the work of independent literary publishers. Once again, the VT supplied the words that challenged some of the leading lights of the New York publishing world.

More Ms.-teries of “Ms.”
October 23, 2009
In this Sunday’s “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine, I delve into the history of the title Ms. used as a marriage-neutral title for women. As I revealed here on Word Routes back in June, the earliest known proposal for the modern use of Ms. appeared in the Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican on November 10, 1901. And as the proposal reemerged over the ensuing decades, two nagging questions kept getting asked: how do you pronounce it, and what does it stand for?

No Soap (Radio): An Advertiser’s Little White “Lye”
October 20, 2009
My wife recently spotted the following perplexing line on Crabtree & Evelyn’s website, advertising their hand soap: “Our gentle cleansing liquid soaps are pH-balanced and soap-free.” That’s right, they’re selling soap-free soap. I’ve heard of a “nothing-burger,” but “nothing-soap”?

The Biggest Misnomer of All Time?
October 12, 2009
When Columbus arrived in the New World 517 years ago, this pivotal moment of cultural contact was fraught with misunderstanding. Upon finding the native Lucayans on the small Caribbean island where he made landfall, Columbus dubbed them Indians, under the mistaken impression that he had navigated all the way to the eastern shores of Asia. Explorers and cartographers quickly figured out that Columbus was utterly mistaken, and yet even now his monumental error lives on in the word Indian to refer to indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.

At the End of the Day, What’s, You Know, Annoying? Whatever!
October 9, 2009
It was all over the news yesterday: according to a new poll from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, whatever is the word that Americans find most annoying. The poll asked respondents which word or phrase bothered them the most, and whatever easily swamped the competition, with 47 percent naming it the most annoying. You know came in at 25 percent, it is what it is at 11 percent, anyway at 7 percent, and at the end of the day at 2 percent. Despite the widespread media attention, we should ask: does this poll really tell us anything useful?

Do We Care Less About “Could Care Less”?
October 6, 2009
In this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, I take over the “On Language” spot to pay tribute to the man who originated the column, William Safire. (You can already read the online version here.) It’s not quite as personal as the remembrance I posted

Remembering the Language Maven
September 28, 2009
William Safire passed away over the weekend at the age of 79, and his loss is felt particularly strongly by those who loyally followed his “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine for the past three decades. Safire retired from his Pulitzer Prize-winning political column for the Times in 2005, but he continued to relish his role as “language maven” to the very end. He was not simply a pundit on matters political and linguistic, however: he was also an extremely generous man, both publicly in his philanthropic work with the Dana Foundation and privately with friends and colleagues.

The Un-Believable Un-Verb
September 21, 2009
This past Sunday I had the opportunity to fill in once again for William Safire’s “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine. This time I focused on how the prefix un- is getting pressed into service for all sorts of new verbs — particularly in the novel lingo of social networking, where following, friending, and favoriting can be instantly reversed by unfollowing, unfriending, and unfavoriting.

Hut! The Story Behind a Football Interjection
September 14, 2009
The National Football League kicked into gear this past weekend, accompanied by the usual hoopla from the sports media. In honor of the start of the football season, the television show “NFL Films Presents” put together a segment on the word hut, an interjection shouted by quarterbacks when initiating a play. They asked a number of NFL players and coaches their theories about the origin of hut, and then called upon a linguist to set the record straight. That linguist happened to be me, so I found myself unaccountably sharing air time with the likes of Don Shula and Tom Coughlin.

Celebrating the Beatles: Goo Goo Goo Joob!
September 9, 2009
Today is a big day for Beatles fans: the band’s entire catalog is being reissued in digitally remastered form, and the video game “The Beatles: Rock Band” is also set for release. And what better day than 09/09/09, considering the band’s love of the number nine (enneaphilia?), from “The One After 909” to “Revolution No. 9.” In honor of the latest wave of Beatles nostalgia, I’ve been mulling over a bit of nonsense from the fertile mind of John Lennon: the timeless chant heard in “I Am the Walrus,” “Goo goo goo joob.”

Why Americans Celebrate Labor (and not Labour) Day
September 7, 2009
It’s the first Monday in September, when the United States observes Labor Day by avoiding labor. Today is a holiday north of the border too, but in Canada it’s called Labour Day. Labour, of course, is the accepted spelling in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries like Canada. Americans prefer labor to labour, just as they prefer color, favor, honor, humor, neighbor, and a few dozen other words ending in -o(u)r. How did the spellings diverge?

Mailbag Friday: “Regime” or “Regimen”?
September 4, 2009
Today’s Mailbag Friday question comes from Bob D., a doctor from Newton, Massachusetts. Bob asks: “What is up with the constant misuse of the word regime? It drives me crazy. It is like regimen never existed.”

Not So Mad Props: A “Mad Men” Anachronism
August 25, 2009
The makers of the critically acclaimed TV drama “Mad Men” pride themselves on their meticulous attention to authentic period detail, lovingly recreating the early 1960s world of Madison Avenue admen. The show’s prop masters are charged with getting every little thing right, from the prices on receipts to the secretaries’ restrictive undergarments. So it’s always a bit of a surprise to discover an anachronism lurking on the “Mad Men” set. The most recent episode featured one such historical goof, though only die-hard dictionary buffs would have noticed.

The Lexicon of the Health Care Debate
August 21, 2009
The fight over health care reform that has dominated American political discourse in recent months has often ended up as a fight about language. Let’s take a look at some of the highly charged terms used by the supporters and opponents of President Obama’s proposed health care initiatives.

Learning to Love the Semicolon
August 19, 2009
Yesterday, our Editorial Emergency crew Simon Glickman and Julia Rubiner offered up a great antidote to semicolon-phobia. “Once you understand their appeal,” they advise, “semicolons can be addictive.” Simon and Julia aren’t the only ones singing the praises of this humble punctuation mark. Lately we’ve seen surprising expressions of affection for the semicolon, from New York to Paris.

Mailbag Friday: “Caveat”
August 14, 2009
Laura C. of Wantage, N.J. writes in with today’s Mailbag Friday question: Co-workers keep using the word caveat around work and it’s driving me crazy. People will say, “This is a great plan, but the caveat is…” (meaning ‘the hook or catch is…’). Sometimes they’ll use it as a transitive verb: “Let’s caveat that proposed media spend.” Is this really acceptable?

“Fail” for the Win!
August 7, 2009
In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, I’m the guest writer for the “On Language” column while William Safire is on vacation. I use my pinch-hitting spot to look at recent developments with the word fail, which in online usage has transformed from a verb to an interjection and a noun (and even sometimes an adjective). But truth be told, fail is only the most prominent example of a much wider phenomenon, with a whole series of expressive words getting similar treatment.

Word Power, People Power: English and the Philippines
August 4, 2009
The recent death of Corazon Aquino has stirred memories of her shining moment in 1986, when she became President of the Philippines after a series of protests against the oppressive Marcos regime. The uprising was known both inside and outside of the Philippines as “People Power.” The use of an English phrase for such a pivotal moment in national history is a reminder of just how important the English language has been to the Philippines since the advent of U.S. colonialism there more than a century ago. And the Philippines, in turn, has had an impact on English as spoken in other countries.

The Mystery of “Cronkiters”
July 27, 2009
Last week, after the death of Walter Cronkite, I wrote about how two words seemed irrevocably linked to the great newsman: avuncular and anchorman. Obituaries claimed that the term anchorman was first coined to refer to Cronkite, but as I wrote in Slate, this isn’t exactly true: there were earlier “anchormen” on television, even if they didn’t play quite the same coordinating role as Cronkite and his emulators. The Associated Press obituary, which was picked up by news outlets around the world, followed up the anchorman claim with another linguistic nugget about Cronkite, and this one is on even shakier factual ground.

Mnemonics, from Roy G. Biv to Mary’s Violet Eyes
July 24, 2009
Earlier this week in the Book Nook section of our Educators page, we featured an excerpt from Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher’s Learning Words Inside and Out, all about how teachers can use mnemonics to help students commit words to memory. Some of these memory aids are extremely well-known: most everyone knows Roy G. Biv spells out the initial letters of the seven colors in the spectrum, for instance. But there’s an endless number of other mnemonic devices that get passed down from generation to generation, covering just about every field of human endeavor.

The Avuncular Anchorman
July 20, 2009
In the outpouring of remembrances since the passing of Walter Cronkite on Friday, two polysyllabic words beginning with “a” have proved to be inextricably linked to “the most trusted man in America”: avuncular and anchorman. It’s hard to describe Mr. Cronkite without using one or the other, or preferably both.

Know Your Nunchucks!
July 16, 2009
An odd moment in this week’s confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor came when Senator Orrin Hatch questioned her about a case involving martial arts weapons commonly known in English as “nunchucks” or “nunchuck sticks.” The exchange between Hatch and Sotomayor sounded like something you might encounter at a Bruce Lee fan club meeting, not in a high-profile Senate hearing.

Sarah Palin, from Pit Bull to Dead Fish?
July 9, 2009
When Alaska Governor Sarah Palin burst onto the national scene less than a year ago, she made a memorable impression with an animal-related witticism. In her speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination at the 2008 Republican National Convention, she asked, “You know what the difference is between a hockey mom and a pit bull?” The answer, of course, was “lipstick.” Now, as Palin exits the political stage (at least for now), she has again used a metaphor drawn from the animal kingdom.

The United States Is… Or Are?
July 3, 2009
We’re coming up on the Fourth of July, when the United States is full of barbecues, fireworks, parades, and competitive hot dog eating. But why do we say “the United States is full of…” instead of “the United States are“? On Independence Day, there’s no better time to reflect on how the rise of America’s national unity was mirrored by its grammatical unity, as “the United States” turned into a singular noun.

Hunting the Elusive First “Ms.”
June 23, 2009
In the dictionary game, when you’ve found a historical example of word that is earlier than anything previously found, it’s called an “antedating.” Looking for antedatings in American English has been utterly transformed by the advent of digitized newspaper databases. Now, hot on the heels of my antedating of jazz in New Orleans, I have another early 20th-century discovery to report: from 1901, the first known proposal for using the title Ms. to refer to a woman regardless of her marital status.

Powers of Ten
June 11, 2009
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about our decimal system and the way that exponential powers of ten capture our imagination. In part, that’s because I’ve been called upon by various news outlets this week to counter a claim that the English language is adding its millionth word. But it’s also because of a humbler, more personal milestone: what you’re reading right here is (drumroll, please) my one hundredth Word Routes column.

“Jazz”: A Tale of Three Cities
June 8, 2009
New Orleans is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of jazz. But is it also the birthplace of “jazz” — that is, the name for the music and not just the music itself? New evidence shows that the term jazz, also spelled jas or jass in the early days, was in use in New Orleans as early as 1916. However, that doesn’t beat Chicago, where the term was applied to music in 1915. And while many of the Windy City’s early jazz musicians hailed from New Orleans, Chicago likely borrowed the word jazz from another city: San Francisco.

The Story Behind “Hobson-Jobson”
June 4, 2009
I recently made my way to Bloomington, Indiana for the biennial conference of the Dictionary Society of North America, a sublime convergence of unabashed word-nerdery. There was a fascinating array of paper presentations, on everything from grand old men like Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster to cutting-edge techniques in online lexicography. But one paper that I found particularly enjoyable had to do with a Victorian-era “Anglo-Indian glossary” that has had remarkable staying power over the past century or so, perhaps in part due to its memorable title: Hobson-Jobson. The paper, by Traci Nagle of Indiana University, took a look at exactly how the dictionary ended up with such a peculiar name.

Tracking Down “The Missing Link”
June 2, 2009
A 47-million-year-old fossil of a newly discovered primate species has been trumpeted in the media as “the missing link” in human evolution. Nicknamed “Ida,” the fossil is remarkably well-preserved, but paleontologists have scoffed at the “missing link” claim: it’s not even clear if Ida is a close relative of us anthropoids, and in any case, the whole metaphor of “the missing link” only really works in the outdated model of evolution as a linear chain or ladder. But all the hoopla surrounding Ida inspired Nature editor Henry Gee to ask (via Twitter), how long have people been using the expression “the missing link”?

National Spelling Bee: Kavya Triumphs!
May 29, 2009
In the grueling finale of the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee, 13-year-old Kavya Shivashankar of Olathe, Kansas emerged as the winner, beating out 10 other frighteningly good spellers. This was her fourth consecutive appearance in the finals of the Bee, and over the years she has gradually crept up to the top spot, moving from 10th to 8th to 4th to 1st place. She was inspired by Nupur Lala, winner of the 1999 competition (and one of the stars of the wonderful documentary Spellbound), and now she joins Nupur in the pantheon of great spellers. Congratulations, Kavya!

National Spelling Bee: 41 Survive Tough Words in Prelims
May 28, 2009
The preliminary rounds of the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee are over! After a computerized test and two rounds of spelling on stage, 41 of the original 243 contestants have made it to the semifinal round. And even in these early rounds, the spellers encountered some tremendously difficult words.

Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee: Two Million Words and Counting
May 26, 2009
The 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee kicks off today, an annual celebration of America’s passion for competitive spelling. We here at the Visual Thesaurus know just how deep that passion runs: our own Spelling Bee, launched less than a year ago, has already attracted tens of thousands players who have tried their hand at spelling a grand total of more than 2,000,000 words. And all of the data that we’ve collected thus far is providing new insights into the mysteries of English spelling, pinpointing the words that are the most devilishly challenging — even for the very best spellers.

McDonald’s Puts the Accent on Advertising
May 21, 2009
McDonald’s has launched an ambitious marketing campaign for its new coffee line, McCafé. In one commercial currently saturating American airwaves, viewers are advised that you can “McCafé your day” by enlivening your daily grind. The ad extends the acute accent mark at the end of “McCafé” to various other words: a “commute” becomes a “commuté,” a “cubicle” becomes a “cubiclé,” and so forth. Will this wordplay work with American consumers, or will the exotic diacritics fall on deaf ears?

Which Words Do You Love and Which Do You Hate?
May 19, 2009
Sometimes our perspective on language isn’t exactly rational: we love some words and absolutely despise other ones. What inspires such deep feelings, and why does word hate often seem to run hotter than word love? In the case of words like impactful, discussed in yesterday’s Red Pen Diaries, the bad vibes may arise because of an association with vacuous management-speak or other institutional jargon. But other times a word is disliked because it just sounds, well, icky. A look at some of the favorite and least favorite words selected by Visual Thesaurus subscribers offers some insight on verbal attractions and aversions.

Mailbag Friday: “These Ones”
May 15, 2009
Welcome to another edition of Mailbag Friday! Carol B. writes in with today’s question: As an American living in Australia, I’m overwhelmed by the common use of “these ones.” I came across it yesterday in a British memoir! It grates on my nerves. Anybody else?

Of Clunkers and Junkers
May 12, 2009
Leaders in the U.S. House of Representative recently reached an agreement on a plan that would award vouchers of up to $4,500 to car owners who trade in older vehicles for more fuel-efficient models. The proposed legislation has a nickname that is memorably alliterative: “Cash for Clunkers.” How did clunker become the favored American word for cars that are past their prime?

The Language of Social Media: “Unlike” Any Other
May 7, 2009
Earlier this week I appeared as a guest on the NPR show “Charlotte Talks” (from Charlotte, North Carolina) to talk about language in the electronic age. Callers expressed a fair amount of hand-wringing about how English usage is under fire from new modes of communication, from text-messaging to social media sites. Rather than focusing on the negative, I’d like to celebrate some of the innovative linguistic forms that have been bubbling up online.

In Search of “Swine Flu”
April 30, 2009
“Swine flu is the new Susan Boyle of search terms,” announces a headline in Australia’s The Age. The Scottish singing sensation was last week’s news: people are no longer busy conducting online searches for Ms. Boyle (or for her favored expression,

Susan Boyle is Gobsmacked (and Poleaxed Too)
April 21, 2009
Unless you’ve been living under an Internet-free rock, you’ve probably seen the enthralling video of Scotland’s Susan Boyle singing on the television show Britain’s Got Talent. According to the latest numbers, the video of Boyle’s performance has already attracted more than 100 million online views. But it’s not only her singing prowess that is attracting worldwide attention: it has also been reported that “Web searches for the term gobsmacked spiked after Boyle used the British slang meaning utterly astonished when describing her reaction to newfound widespread acclaim.”

Mailbag Friday: “Texted”
April 17, 2009
Today’s Mailbag Friday question comes all the way from Dakar, Senegal. Jodi W. asks: “What’s up with texted? As in, ‘I texted her yesterday.’ Is it a real word?”

Plundering the History of “Pirate”
April 14, 2009
The recent hijacking of the Maersk Alabama cargo ship off the coast of Somalia serves as a chilling reminder that seagoing pirates continue to threaten international waters, from the Gulf of Aden to the Straits of Malacca. For many of us, it’s peculiar to see the word pirate making headlines, since it seems so out of place in the 21st century — at least outside of Disney theme parks.

Booooo!
April 9, 2009
Yesterday I had the privilege of appearing on the WNYC radio show Soundcheck to talk about the origins of booing. The news hook was a recent Metropolitan Opera production of La Sonnambula that got booed by the audience thanks to its avant-garde staging. Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout discussed the booing incident, and I was there to provide some historical and linguistic context.

Inside “Genericide”
April 2, 2009
Yesterday in the Language Lounge, we took a look at what happens when a trademark ends up lapsing into generic use. The term genericide came up as a description for this loss of a trademark’s protected status. The word raised some eyebrows among our readers, as well it should.

A Brief Glossary of Recession-Speak
March 26, 2009
With the deepening of “The Great Recession” (or whatever we end up calling the current crisis), our language continues to reflect the tough economic times. Here is a primer on recession-related terminology that has been circulating in recent months, as we struggle to put the global financial uncertainty into words.

Where Did We Get “The Whole Nine Yards”?
March 25, 2009
Among the idioms of modern American English, few are as puzzling to unpack as the expression “the whole nine yards,” meaning ‘the full extent of something.’ Though it is of relatively recent vintage, etymologists have yet to discover a credible historical explanation for what the “nine yards” might refer to — there are a multitude of theories, some quite fanciful, but none are supported by documentary evidence. In the past few years, however, some significant progress has been made to unearth early examples of the idiom, which may eventually help to smoke out where those “nine yards” originally came from.

Chalk Talk
March 23, 2009
American sports fans are currently engrossed in the NCAA College Basketball Tournament, a.k.a. “March Madness.” Even President Obama filled out a Tournament bracket with his projected winners in the single-elimination format. So far, if you picked the favorites to advance (as Obama mostly did), your bracket is doing nicely: only one team (Arizona) has pulled off a significant upset to get into the “Sweet Sixteen.” In betting parlance, chalk has predominated in the Tournament. But how did chalk come to be the term associated with favored teams?

Mailbag Friday: “Reticent”
March 20, 2009
Maria C. of Jersey City, NJ writes in with today’s Mailbag Friday question: “My coworker always uses the word reticent when he really means reluctant. Isn’t he using the wrong word?”

Play It As It Lays
March 17, 2009
Yesterday, writing teacher Margaret Hundley Parker offered a delightful lesson on the perils of learning grammar from rock and roll lyrics. Among the grammatical malefactors are Bob Dylan, whose song “Lay, Lady, Lay” uses the verb lay in an intransitive fashion instead of lie. Likewise, Dylan sang “If not for you, babe, I’d lay awake all night,” and “I wanna lay right down and die.” But he should get points for using lay in the transitive too, as in: “Lay down your weary tune,” or using lay as the proper past-tense form of lie: “I spied an old hobo, in a doorway he lay.” Still, if the foremost bard of American popular music can’t be consistent on this point, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Banks: the Good, the Bad, and the Zombie
March 12, 2009
As the recession worsens, we’re all learning far more than we ever wanted to know about the ins and outs of the banking industry, ground zero of the financial meltdown. And we’re learning new lingo too: the news these days brings word of good banks, bad banks, zombie banks, and even banksters.

Mailbag Friday: Feeling “Nauseous”
March 6, 2009
Last month a usage dispute broke out in the comments section here on the Visual Thesaurus. Our “Evasive Maneuvers” columnist Mark Peters described a friend who “started feeling nauseous.” Two commenters objected to this use of nauseous, saying that the word properly describes someone or something that is sickening, and that the word Mark should have used is nauseated. Who’s right?

ACPT ’09: A Last Look Back
March 3, 2009
The 2009 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held this past weekend at the Brooklyn Marriott, had it all: warm cameraderie of puzzle-minded word lovers, and high drama in the finals that left the audience alternately gasping and cheering. If you missed any of our coverage of the Tournament, here’s a handy recap.

Crossword Tournament ’09: Sunday Report
March 1, 2009
The finals of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament promised to be a thrilling event, and it did not disappoint. Tyler Hinman emerged as the winner for a fifth consecutive time, but only after a grueling and highly dramatic round against fellow finalists Francis Heaney and Trip Payne.

Crossword Tournament ’09: Saturday Report
February 28, 2009
The first day of competitive play at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament saw 684 contestants fill the main ballroom of the Brooklyn Marriott, solving six puzzles that ranged from breezy to downright fiendish. With the interim results tallied, the scoring leaders are mostly familiar faces in the crossword world — with one notable exception: Dan Feyer, in only his second year of tournament play, is sitting pretty in the number one spot.

Puzzlin’ Evidence
February 27, 2009
Tonight the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament kicks off at the Brooklyn Marriott with “an evening of games and entertainments” — a night of conviviality before the Tournament proper begins Saturday morning. We here at the Visual Thesaurus are happy to help sponsor the Friday fun, providing complimentary VT subscriptions to the prize-winners. I’ll be attending tonight (in advance of competing in the Tournament in the “rookie” category), and I’m looking forward to meeting up with friends old and new in this collegial community of diehard verbivores.

How’s Your Crosswordese?
February 24, 2009
With this year’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament just around the corner, there is no better time to consider that peculiar, vowel-heavy brand of English known as “crosswordese.” Think you’re a first-rate cruciverbalist? Quick: can you tell an anoa from an unau?

When Typos are Set in Stone
February 18, 2009
Every writer knows the feeling: you’ve just released a carefully edited piece of prose into circulation, and when you take another look you cringe at the sight of a typo that you missed. With online writing, typos can very often be fixed without anyone even noticing. Printed errors usually require red-faced corrections. But don’t feel too bad: imagine if your typos were etched in granite for all to see!

Happy Lincoln/Darwin Day!
February 12, 2009
Today marks the bicentennial of two of the most influential minds of the modern age: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Besides sharing a birthday, Lincoln and Darwin also shared an eloquence with the English language, despite the very different prose styles of their work. In a new book, Angels and Ages, Adam Gopnik argues that this shared eloquence allowed them to impart their world-changing visions. But what about on a more basic level, that of the individual word? What lasting contributions did Lincoln and Darwin make to the English lexicon?

Hold the Mayo!
February 10, 2009
Yesterday’s Visual Thesaurus Word of the Day was mayonnaise, and the entry for it was a bit too terse for some readers: “This French word has enjoyed a handful of spellings since its first 19th-century appearance and merits an etymology of nearly 300 words in the OED, the gist of which is ‘origin uncertain.'” There’s nothing less satisfying in an etymological explanation than “origin uncertain,” so let’s explore what’s behind those tantalizing words.

Mailbag Friday: “Taking Your Lumps”
February 6, 2009
Greg H. of Boston, MA writes in with today’s Mailbag Friday question: “When President Obama was interviewed about Tom Daschle’s decision to bow out of the nomination process for Health and Human Services, he gave this mea culpa: ‘Did I screw up in this situation? Absolutely. I’m willing to take my lumps.’ I understand he means that he’s taking the blame for the situation, but where do the ‘lumps’ come from?”

Buddy Holly, Wordsmith
February 3, 2009
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash along with Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson. Rather than glumly mope about “The Day the Music Died,” as Don McLean dubbed the tragedy in the well-worn song, “American Pie,” I’d prefer to reflect on what a tremendously gifted singer/songwriter Holly was. He had a beautiful touch with the English language (sung in his signature hiccupy style), and in his lyrics he found ways to take familiar words and phrases and innovatively shape them into his own. Here are my brief thoughts on the language of four of his songs.

Mixing and Mashing Words (With a Little Moshing)
January 27, 2009
A blog commenter recently described the linguistic situation in her household as “a mixmash of English and German.” As she later explained, the word mixmash was invented by her daughters to describe their experiences growing up bilingual. Now, mixmash is not a word you’ll find in any dictionary, but it’s easy enough to appreciate it as a mash-up of mix and (mish)mash. It’s a wonderful example of how speakers of English are constantly mixing and mashing the lexicon, and yet somehow we manage to understand each other just fine.

Taking the Oath of Office… Faithfully
January 22, 2009
Last night an unusual event happened at the White House. Chief Justice John Roberts re-administered the presidential oath of office to Barack Obama, a day and a half after they had performed the same ritual rather shakily in the inaugural ceremony. White House counsel Gregory B. Craig explained: “We believe that the oath of office was administered effectively and that the president was sworn in appropriately yesterday. But the oath appears in the Constitution itself, and out of an abundance of caution, because there was one word out of sequence, Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath a second time.” What was that one out-of-sequence word? Faithfully.

“Enormity”: Monstrous Wickedness?
January 20, 2009
Barack Obama gives his inaugural address today, but on Sunday he gave a speech that previewed the main event. “Despite the enormity of the task that lies ahead,” Obama said, “I stand here today as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure, that the dream of our founders will live on in our time.” This line echoed his victory speech last November: “I know you didn’t do this just to win an election and I know you didn’t do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead.” Is Obama misusing enormity, or is he inaugurating a semantic change?

Winsome or Wistful?
January 16, 2009
In one of the final press briefings from the Bush White House, counselor to the president Ed Gillespie used some peculiar wording yesterday to describe the current mood of his boss: “You know, I would say that he’s gotten a little more winsome. I remember somebody asking me back in, like, September, you know, things must be — things must be getting winsome. And I thought, you know, those of us who work here wish it were a little more winsome sometimes.” Say what?

The Word of the Year is… “Bailout”!
January 12, 2009
Greetings, everyone! I’ve just come back from San Francisco, where I attended the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting (held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America). As is the custom, the linguists and lexicographers in attendance took a break from their scholarly presentations to have some fun selecting the Word of the Year for 2008. This time around, bailout emerged as a powerful frontrunner, and sure enough it ultimately proved to be the winner.

Get Your Shovels Ready!
January 8, 2009
The countdown is on for the American Dialect Society’s selection for 2008 Word of the Year, the oldest and most prestigious WOTY event in the land. The ADS selection will happen Friday, January 9, at the group’s annual meeting, held this year in San Francisco. The voting is open to the public, so Visual Thesaurus readers in the Bay area are welcome to drop in for the WOTY fun. I’ll be attending (I’m on the ADS Executive Council), and I have a few favorites I’ll be lobbying for. One of them is a word that offers a ray of light in our current moment of economic doom and gloom: shovel-ready.

That’s So Boss!
January 6, 2009
A New York Times article yesterday about Google Book Search features some research I did on the petulant phrase “You’re not the boss of me!” This is an expression that many people suppose is rather recent — some might have first come across it in the past five or ten years, while others might fancy that this bit of kid-speak is restricted to their own family usage. But using Google Book Search, it’s easy to find examples all the way back to 1883.

Here a Czar, There a Czar…
December 30, 2008
If you’ve been keeping up with the news about the Obama transition, you might have noticed an awful lot of “czar” talk. From “health czar” to “climate czar” to “urban affairs czar” to “technology czar” to “copyright czar,” it seems like there’s a czarship for every policy area in the new administration. And even though the proposal for a “car czar” stalled on Capitol Hill, expect that pirate-friendly rhyme to make headlines again in 2009.

Mailbag Friday: “Jerry-Rigged”
December 19, 2008
My mention earlier this week of the word gerrymander (after Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, blamed for the tortuous redistricting in his state in 1812) inspired some free association. One commenter posited a connection to the jerry of jerry-built (“shoddy; of inferior workmanship and materials”), though it turns out that word only shows up about half a century after Gerry first gerrymandered. Jerry-built, in turn, led another VT subscriber to wonder, “What about jerry-rigged? I’ve heard that it’s really supposed to be jury-rigged.”

Eponyms in the Making?
December 16, 2008
Every now and then, a prominent person achieves so much notoriety that his or her name enters the language as an eponym. Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry gave us gerrymander, after carving a salamander-shaped electoral district that favored his party in 1812. Major Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian officer who collaborated with the Germans during World War II, so quisling came to mean “a traitor to one’s country.” And when Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was quashed in 1987, it was said that he got Borked by his opponents. Now there are a couple of names in the news that just might lend themselves to new eponyms.

The “Hipster Spelling Bee” (Sponsored by the VT!)
December 10, 2008
Now in its eighth year, the Williamsburg Spelling Bee has gained a reputation as the “Hipster Spelling Bee” (thanks to the ever-hip denizens of the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn). But really, it’s just an excuse for some good old-fashioned spellin’ fun in a convivial crowd. On Monday night, Robert Moy was crowned the winner of this year’s Bee, and the Visual Thesaurus was happy to be a sponsor for the final event.

Happy Landings on the “Glide Path”
December 9, 2008
President-Elect Obama says we’re “now on a glide path to reduce our forces in Iraq.” He also says we’re “on a glide path for long-term sustainable economic growth.” What’s up with all the gliding?

Mailbag Friday: “Brand-New” or “Bran-New”?
December 5, 2008
Dorothy G. of Teeswater, Ontario writes in with today’s Mailbag Friday question: “I have always used bran-new to imply “unused,” “just out of the package,” etc. But when I look it up, I also find brand-new. Entirely too many years ago, if I used brand-new, I was assured that it was merely a mispronouncing of bran-new. I’d appreciate knowing the difference.”

2008: The Year of “Oversharing”
December 2, 2008
Another week, another Word of the Year selection! The latest comes from the editors at Webster’s New World Dictionary, who have selected the useful verb overshare. They define it as: “to divulge excessive personal information, as in a blog or broadcast interview, prompting reactions ranging from alarmed discomfort to approval.” It’s certainly a word that captures the zeitgeist of the Age of Too Much Information.

Moving with Deliberate Haste
November 25, 2008
President-Elect Obama has begun to assemble his nominees for Cabinet posts — something he had promised to do, in his first post-election press conference, “with all deliberate haste.” If deliberate means “marked by careful consideration or reflection,” and haste means “overly eager speed (and possible carelessness),” doesn’t that make “deliberate haste” an oxymoron?

Mailbag Friday: “Meh”
November 21, 2008
It’s a special journalistic edition of Mailbag Friday! Today’s question comes from Molly Eichel, assistant editor at Philadelphia City Paper: “I was hoping you could help me out with a linguistic conundrum. I work at the Philadelphia City Paper and I wrote a blog post about the inclusion of the word meh into the upcoming edition of the Collins English Dictionary. I think meh doesn’t deserve a spot in a reference book; it’s slang at best and sound effect at worst. A blogger at Philadelphia Weekly disagrees. I would really like to hear your thoughts on the matter, so it becomes a legitimate discussion rather than a spat between two bloggers. What do you think about meh‘s inclusion into a dictionary?”

Perplexed by “Nonplussed” and “Bemused”
November 18, 2008
Yesterday, our “Editorial Emergency” duo of Simon Glickman and Julia Rubiner launched a salvo against a common usage of the word nonplussed, a word they “wager more people get wrong than right.” That opens an interesting can of worms: if a word or phrase used to have Meaning A, but more people now use it with Meaning B, is it time for the Meaning A folks to stand aside?

NOAD Word of the Year: “Hypermiling”
November 11, 2008
The leaves have fallen and there’s a chill in the air, so that could mean only one thing: Word of the Year season is starting! This year, the New Oxford American Dictionary kicks things off with its annual choice: hypermiling, meaning “attempting to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s car and one’s driving techniques.”

Mailbag Friday: “Landslide”
November 7, 2008
Jon D. of King of Prussia, Pa. writes in with a Mailbag Friday question: ” There has been a lot of talk about a landslide victory during this recent presidential election. Not being sure if we actually experienced one or not, I was wondering if you could educate us on what the term actually means and its historical context in describing elections.”

The VT Helps Out A Literary Bee
November 4, 2008
Last night, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses held its fifth annual Spelling Bee in support of its non-profit efforts to help out independent literary publishers. The CLMP always attracts an all-star cast of spellers from the New York book world. This time around, the Visual Thesaurus joined forces with the CLMP Bee, supplying the words to stump the cream of the literary crop.

Drapes, Curtains, and an Old Political Standby
October 30, 2008
In the home stretch of the presidential campaign trail, John McCain has been saying that his opponent Barack Obama is so sure that he’s bound for the White House that he’s already “measuring the drapes.” It’s a durable political expression, though very often it’s said as “measuring for drapes” (which makes a bit more sense), and sometimes it’s curtains that get presumptuously measured (for), rather than drapes. What’s the difference, anyway?

Mailbag Friday: “Out-Physical”
October 24, 2008
Today’s question for Mailbag Friday comes from our own puzzlemaster, Brendan Emmett Quigley, who’s been watching a lot of football. “What gives with all these sportscasters saying ‘Team A out-physicaled Team B’? Physical, last time I checked, is an adjective and not a verb, right?” Brendan’s question reminds me of a saying attributed to the great philosopher Calvin (the one from “Calvin and Hobbes,” of course): “Verbing weirds language.”

Is Dr. Johnson Rolling in His Grave?
October 21, 2008
Last week, American lexiphiles celebrated the 250th birthday of Noah Webster — or his semiquincentennial, if you want to be sesquipedalian about it. On the other side of the pond, British word lovers recently had their own Dictionary Day, on the 299th birthday of Samuel Johnson. (Mark your calendars now for the big Johnsonian blow-out of September 18, 2009, sure to be a rollicking tercentennial!)

Mailbag Friday: “Phoning It In”
October 17, 2008
It’s time once again for Mailbag Friday! Marc T. of New York, NY writes: “John McCain recently said that he put his campaign on hold to work on the Senate bailout package because ‘it’s not my style to simply phone it in.’ Why do we talk about doing something in a lackluster or perfunctory way as phoning it in? Who originally did the phoning in, anyway?” The history of American slang is often illuminating, and this is no exception: tracing the origins of this expression tells an intriguing story about the intersection of the technological and the theatrical.

Green Behind the Ears?
October 14, 2008
What will persist in our collective memory from last week’s presidential debate, the second of three between John McCain and Barack Obama? The Philadelphia Inquirer suggests that only two remarks will be remembered: McCain referring to Obama as “that one,” and Obama’s defense against charges of naivete, “that somehow, you know, I’m green behind the ears.” McCain’s “that one” has already become an ironic catchphrase, even generating a website selling “That One ’08” T-shirts. But what’s the deal with “green behind the ears”? Didn’t Obama mean “wet behind the ears”?

Collins, Don’t Exuviate That Word!
October 7, 2008
It’s a dirty little secret of lexicography that for every new word or meaning that gets added to a revised edition of a dictionary, something usually has to come out. Only the mammoth Oxford English Dictionary has the luxury of never doing away with old entries. Smaller dictionaries are expected to introduce new words with every edition, but they’re usually mum about what is removed to keep the published work to a reasonable size. Collins English Dictionary, on the other hand, is taking a novel approach by announcing old words that are on the chopping block, in order to see which words the public thinks should earn a stay of execution.

Mailbag Friday: “Funner” and “Funnest”
October 3, 2008
Jennifer A. of Concord, CA writes: “Recently, Apple launched some new products, including the new iPod Touch. According to the slide shown at the keynote presentation, this is the “funnest iPod ever.” Ugh. I grew up with my parents correcting the use of funnest and funner so this is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me. Not only was the word used in the presentation, but it’s right there on the Apple.com homepage too.”

On the Trail of “Bailing Out”
September 30, 2008
The latest headlines are dominated by news of the failure of the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a $700 billion “bailout” of the financial industry. As I explained on the Voice of America program “Wordmaster” last week, bailout in the financial sense, meaning the rescue of a bankrupt or near-bankrupt entity, is a figurative extension from the world of aviation. A pilot who needs to make an emergency landing bails out to safety. That part of the term’s etymology is relatively clear, but figuring out its ultimate origin is a bit trickier.

Swinging in the Battleground States
September 25, 2008
In a recent interview on the Voice of America radio program Wordmaster (a show that seeks to explain the vagaries of American English to an international audience), I was asked about a number of terms relating to the U.S. presidential campaign. We talked about red states (leaning Republican), blue states (leaning Democratic), and purple states (somewhere in between), a topic I discussed on

More Musings on “Myself”
September 23, 2008
Yesterday we heard from contributors Simon Glickman and Julia Rubiner about a pattern they identify as an “epidemic”: using the word myself in place of a plain old personal pronoun like I or me. They were disheartened to see Merriam-Webster’s treatment of this use of myself as no big deal, writing, “Don’t you hate it when something you were so sure was absolutely wrong is reduced to the status of pet peeve?” I wanted to flesh out the myself story, since it’s been a point of contention for generations of grammarians and usage mavens.

Mailbag Friday: “Dude”
September 19, 2008

VT subscriber Kcecelia of San Francisco, CA writes in about yesterday’s Visual Thesaurus Word of the Day: dude. She observes that the word’s current usage has little to do with its more historical sense, “a man who is much concerned with his dress and appearance”: “Last month a 20-something man in an Oregon gas station punctuated his conversation with me with references to me as dude. I am a 55-year-old woman. Also, people say duuuude as an exclamation or interjection. I sometimes say dude myself in a more joking manner to people I am with who are sprinkling it liberally into their conversation. I do not mean that they are a fop or a dandy.” Especially now that Todd Palin, husband of Gov. Sarah Palin, is in the news as Alaska’s “First Dude,” this is a good time to reflect on the peculiar history of this all-American word.

Blaming Fannie and Freddie
September 16, 2008
As news from the financial world gets bleaker and bleaker, two scapegoats have emerged in the ongoing credit crunch: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Here’s a sampling of headlines from the Wall Street Journal opinion page: “Fannie Mayhem,” “Fannie and Freddie’s Enablers,” “Frantic Fannie,” “Fannie Mae Ugly,” “Freddie Krueger Mac.” Someone unfamiliar with the American economic system might think that Fannie and Freddie are the new Bonnie and Clyde, shooting up banks with reckless abandon. How did the crisis in the banking sector get so personal?

Of Pigs and Silk and Lipstick
September 11, 2008
The latest political kerfuffle revolves around an expression Barack Obama used at a campaign event on Tuesday: “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” Putting aside the accusation from John McCain’s camp that this had something to do with vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, the saying has a fascinating historical background, and I had a chance to delve into this history for Slate’s “Explainer”.

Does Robert Burns Make You Feel Ramfeezled?
September 9, 2008
The 11th edition of the venerable yet idiosyncratic Chambers Dictionary has just been published. Unlike the 11th editions of its lexicographical rivals Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate and the Concise Oxford (everybody’s going to 11 these days), the big news surrounding the latest Chambers is not about its new words. Rather, the British press has focused on some remarks made in the introduction to the dictionary, written by Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman. Paxman evidently likes to poke fun at all things Scottish, but he stepped over the line when he referred to the work of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet, as nothing more than “sentimental doggerel.”

Mailbag Friday: “Widespreadly”?
September 5, 2008
For today’s Mailbag Friday, we hear from Barbara Z. of Norfolk, VA. She writes: “On the radio I was listening to the beginning of “The Thomas Jefferson Hour” in which Clay Jenkinson speaks as if he were Jefferson. I heard him say the following: “‘I happen to live in the first great era when books were widespreadly available…'” “Widespreadly? That one is new to me!”

The Summer of the “Staycation”
September 3, 2008
Summer’s not officially over, but now that Labor Day is past and the kids are off to school, it’s a good time to look back at the latest batch of estival vocabulary. Back in June I made a case for skadoosh, a fanciful word from the movie Kung Fu Panda, as a candidate for Word of the Summer. And in an interview in July on Wisconsin Public Radio, I discussed some other summery words, from skinterns (scantily dressed Washington D.C. interns) to lawnmower beer (light refreshing beer brewed for easy consumption after a day of yardwork). But like it or not, the one new word that has trumped all others in the Summer of 2008 is staycation, the media-driven coinage for a stay-at-home vacation.

A Little Learning…
August 28, 2008
Last time on Word Routes, we looked at a spelling error that’s common enough to show up frequently in edited text: using acclimation when you mean acclamation. That’s a case of battling homophones: the two words sound the same, but they have different meanings. The problem crops up with other sound-alikes, such as imminent vs. immanent, compliment vs. complement, principle vs. principal, and of course affect vs. effect. (We talked about that last pair recently in our interview with Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary.) These mix-ups are particularly insidious because your spellchecker won’t bail you out — unless, perhaps, you are using a contextual spellchecker like the one that has been developed for Microsoft Office.

Getting Acclimated to “Acclamation”
August 26, 2008
Yesterday’s Visual Thesaurus Word of the Day was acclamation, a timely word now that the Democratic National Convention has begun. Of course, the news out of Denver is that Barack Obama will not be nominated by acclamation (“a voting method in which shouts or applause, rather than ballots, determine the winner”). Instead, there will be a state-by-state roll call for the nomination on Wednesday night, with some votes going to Obama’s erstwhile rival Hillary Clinton, followed by some sort of a unanimous consent for Obama after the first ballot. Columnists Dick Morris and Eileen McGann wrote last week that Obama should have “blocked a roll call by allowing a voice vote to nominate by acclimation.” Whoops!

Mailbag Friday: “(Over)whelmed”
August 22, 2008
Welcome to Mailbag Friday, where we answer your burning questions about the origins of words and phrases. Ivete L. of New York, NY asks: “You can be overwhelmed, and I suppose you can even be underwhelmed. But why can’t you be just plain whelmed?”

Really! Truly! Literally!
August 19, 2008
Yesterday the always entertaining “Editorial Emergency!” team of Simon Glickman and Julia Rubiner contributed a column on the misuse of the word literally. I keep tabs on people’s pet peeves about English usage, and this is certainly one of the most widespread complaints currently in circulation. There’s even a blog entirely devoted to “tracking abuse” of literally. I agree with Simon and Julia that using literally as an intensifier can often “strain credulity” when it’s emphasizing a figurative expression like “a handful of Jewish members.” But allow me to play devil’s advocate for the much-maligned hyperbolic extension of literally. Like many usage bugaboos, it gets a bad rap while other similar perpetrators get off scot-free.

Stumbling over “Synecdoche”
August 12, 2008
It’s happened again: Los Angeles Times readers are up in arms over vocabulary. Last time it was a contretemps over a letter to the editor complaining about tough words like, um, contretemps. This time it’s commenters on the LA Times movie blog, “The Big Picture,” who are slamming a post about the title of a forthcoming movie, Synecdoche, New York.

Mailbag Friday: “Mad Hatter”
August 8, 2008
Today’s question for Mailbag Friday comes to us from Valerie P. of Ottawa, Ontario. Valerie writes: “I was visiting a heritage village in Nova Scotia when a guide in a traditional tailor’s house told me the origin of the expression, mad hatter. He said that the beaver fur the popular top hats were made of was preserved with mercury. The workers gradually absorbed this mercury while making the hats and eventually became mad. The explanation seems a bit sketchy; can you fill in the details, or correct the explanation?”

Medical Misapprehensions
August 7, 2008
On the Web you can find some well-traveled lists of medical malapropisms, supposedly collected from patients who misunderstand names of diseases and medications. So for instance, Alzheimer’s disease becomes old-timer’s disease, sickle-cell anemia becomes sick as hell anemia, spinal meningitis becomes smilin’ mighty Jesus, and phenobarbital becomes peanut butter balls. These lists are good for a laugh, but it turns out misunderstandings of medical terminology can sometimes have dangerous or even deadly consequences.

Don’t Be Eristic, Be Lapidary!
August 5, 2008
A little while back we reported on a Los Angeles Times reader complaining about difficult vocabulary words like contretemps and phantasmagoria appearing in the newspaper. Other L.A. Times readers (and our own commenters) vehemently disagreed, saying that newspapers should shun the old maxim, “Don’t use big words.” The New York Times Magazine clearly does not have a “No Big Words” policy, since Sunday’s edition featured an article with a favorite word of the late logophile William F. Buckley, Jr.: eristic.

Twilighters vs. Twi-Hards
July 31, 2008
It’s the biggest literary sensation since Harry Potter: Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga is coming to an end with the fourth and final installment in her best-selling series of vampire romance novels. Breaking Dawn goes on sale a minute after midnight on August 2, and bookstores across the country are holding Twilight parties for fans who want to buy the book as soon as it’s available. The only question is: what to call this fervent fan base? Some want to be called twilighters and some prefer twi-hards. It’s an indication of just how enthusiastic the fans are that this terminological issue has become a point of contention.

Of Showdowns, Throwdowns, and Hoedowns
July 28, 2008
Last week we featured a debate over contemporary usage of whom, with Baltimore Sun copy editor John McIntyre squaring off against Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky. To be honest, the exchange was a bit too civil and reasonable to live up to its billing as a “usage showdown” — at least based on the Visual Thesaurus definition of showdown as “a hostile disagreement face-to-face.” I was amused to see that on his copy-editing blog, “You Don’t Say,” John McIntyre facetiously referred to the debate with an even more inappropriate term: smackdown, which most people (in the U.S. at least) would associate with professional wrestling. Other violent confrontations ending in -down include beatdown and throwdown. And where do hoedowns fit into all of this?

Pushing to the Cloud: Weird Wireless Words
July 22, 2008
It’s hard to keep up with techie terms these days. Last week, Apple Inc. announced it would no longer use the word push to describe the way that its new online MobileMe service communicates to personal computers and electronic devices like the iPhone. Turns out the service wasn’t always “pushing” data to “the cloud” as quickly as users were expecting. To which non-technophiles would probably say, “Huh?”

Mailbag Friday: “Pipe Dream”
July 18, 2008
For today’s installment of Mailbag Friday, our question comes from VT subscriber Barry Francolino in Romania. (One of our many far-flung correspondents!) Barry writes, “Just interested to know where the word/phrase/idea pipe dream comes from.” The definition given by the Visual Thesaurus, “a fantastic but vain hope (from fantasies induced by the opium pipe),” gives a whiff of its origin.

Beyond “Boyfriend” and “Girlfriend”
July 15, 2008
Last Friday I was delighted to be a return guest on the Wisconsin Public Radio Show “At Issue with Ben Merens” (audio available here). Our ostensible topic was “words of the summer” (including skadoosh, of course!), but once we started taking calls from listeners, the floor was open to any topic of interest to word-savvy Wisconsinites. Much like what happened when I was on the show last December, conversation turned to perceived “gaps” in the English language that callers thought should be filled with new coinages. This time around, Robert from Coloma expressed dissatisfaction with the words boyfriend and girlfriend,

From the Subprime to the Ridiculous
July 10, 2008
If there’s one word that captures the zeitgeist of our current economic downturn, it’s subprime. The American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Year for 2007, and as I described in my last column it is among the new entries in the latest updates of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. But it’s a pretty odd word when you stop to think about it. The newly announced Merriam-Webster definition reads as follows: “having or being an interest rate that is higher than a prime rate and is extended especially to low-income borrowers.” Wait a minute: a loan with a rate that is higher than prime is called sub-prime? How did that happen?

Dictionaries Roll Out New Words
July 8, 2008
Dictionary publishers don’t get too many opportunities for creating PR buzz, but one surefire way of getting some attention is to announce the new words (and new senses of old words) that have been added in the latest update to a particular dictionary. In the past few days there have been new-word announcements for two major dictionaries, one in the US and one in the UK: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition) and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (also in its 11th edition, coincidentally enough). Let’s take a look at what they’re adding.

Mailbag Friday: “Hot Dog”
July 4, 2008
Welcome to the latest installment of Mailbag Friday, our new feature for answering readers’ questions about word origins. For this special Fourth of July edition, we have a very timely query from Jason B. from Wilmington, DE. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about the origin of ‘hot dog.’ What’s the frank truth? I await your answer with relish.”

Skedaddle, Scadoodle, Skidoo, Skadoosh!
June 30, 2008
In Sunday’s Boston Globe I fill in for Jan Freeman, who writes a regular language column called “The Word.” My topic is a silly new word that appears in the movie “Kung Fu Panda”: skadoosh. It came from the fertile mind of Jack Black, voice of Po the Panda, who was inspired by an equally silly old slang expression, 23 skidoo. And skidoo probably came from scadoodle, which in turn is a variant of skedaddle. Whew!

A Contretemps over Newspaper Vocabulary
June 25, 2008
The “Letters to the Editor” section of the Los Angeles Times has featured some heated discussion about what kind of vocabulary is suitable for printing in a newspaper. And no, this doesn’t have anything to do with the “seven dirty words” famously satirized by the late lamented George Carlin. Instead, it’s about some moderately challenging vocab items that you might expect to find on a Visual Thesaurus word list.

Mailbag Friday: “Bamboozle”
June 20, 2008
Welcome to a new feature on Word Routes: Mailbag Friday! This is where we answer your questions about the origins and evolving usage of words and phrases. If you’ve got a burning question, just and we’ll do our best to address it in a future installment of Mailbag Friday. First up is Lisa W. of Smyrna, DE, who writes: “Our youngest son earned the nickname ‘The Bamboozler’ at an early age, for his uncanny ability to outwit his unsuspecting parents. That got me thinking, where does the word bamboozle come from?”

Thinking about Tim Russert, Red States and Blue States
June 17, 2008
The untimely passing of Tim Russert, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, has led many to reminisce about his lasting influence on political reporting. Some obituaries mentioned that Russert has been credited with popularizing the terms “red state” and “blue state,” to refer to states favoring Republican or Democratic candidates. Though Russert’s memorable analysis of the twists and turns of the 2000 presidential election no doubt played a significant role in popularizing the “red/blue state” designations, the history of the color coding is surprisingly complicated.

Pluto: Once a Planet, Now Merely a Plutoid
June 13, 2008
Two years ago, the International Astronomical Union voted to demote Pluto from planetary status, deciding that it was only a “dwarf planet.” There was great uproar among fans of Pluto, even spawning a group calling themselves The Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet. The IAU held firm to its decision, though, and moved on to other nomenclatural issues. A term was needed to encompass Pluto and all Pluto-like objects on the fringes of the solar system out beyond Neptune. This week the IAU finally came up with an official term: plutoid. It’s not the prettiest word, but it does the trick.

The Presumptive Nominee, I Presume?
June 10, 2008
Hillary Clinton suspended her presidential campaign over the weekend, allowing Barack Obama to claim the mantle of “presumptive nominee” for the Democratic Party. Of course, many in the media had already bestowed that title on Obama the previous Tuesday, after the vaunted “superdelegates” gave him an insurmountable lead in the delegate count. John McCain achieved the same feat on the Republican side back in early February when Mitt Romney pulled out of the race, though it took another month for Mike Huckabee to withdraw and seal the deal on McCain’s “presumptive” status. It’s a word we hear every election cycle, but Word Routes reader Courtney S. asks, where does it come from?

The Year of the “Superdelegate”
June 6, 2008
This past week saw Barack Obama clinch the Democratic presidential nomination, with the commitments of undecided “superdelegates” putting him over the top. Even though the term superdelegate has been kicking around Democratic circles since 1981, the word has achieved new prominence this year, when all eyes were on these unpledged party leaders to break the primary deadlock between Obama and Hillary Clinton. We’re less than halfway through 2008, but superdelegate has already emerged as a formidable candidate for Word of the Year.

A Big “Guerdon” for Spelling Bee Champ
June 3, 2008
A hearty congratulations from all of us here at the Visual Thesaurus to Sameer Mishra, winner of the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee! Sameer, a 13-year-old from West Lafayette, Indiana, triumphed over his competitors by correctly spelling a very fitting word in the final round: guerdon, meaning “reward or payment.” His reward was $35,000 in cash and various other prizes. The second-place finisher, Sidharth Chand of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, performed admirably on words like introuvable (“impossible to find”), but he eventually erred in spelling prosopopoeia, a personifying figure of speech.

It’s Spelling Bee Time Again!
May 29, 2008
The annual Scripps National Spelling Bee kicks off today, and every year there seems to be more and more public attention paid to this preeminent spectacle of word-nerdery. As in the past two years, tomorrow’s semifinal and final rounds are being broadcast live on national television (semifinals on ESPN from 11 am to 2 pm, finals on ABC from 8 to 10 pm). It’s always exciting to see middle-schoolers battle it out for the spelling crown, in a competition rife with dramatic “thrill of victory” and “agony of defeat” moments (most memorably depicted in the suspenseful documentary Spellbound). Adults can only marvel at the preternatural abilities of the young finalists to spell super-obscure words that most of us have seldom — if ever — come across. Where do they get those words, anyway?

How Nice is “Nice”?
May 22, 2008
In the United Kingdom, the “nice decade” is over. When Bank of England governor Mervyn King announced recently that “the nice decade is behind us,” he didn’t mean that British pleasantness was at an end. Rather, he was using an acronym, NICE, which stands for “Non-Inflationary Consistent Expansion,” a condition that King says has characterized the last ten years of British economic prosperity. One economist says the country is now heading into VILE years, playing off NICE with his own readymade acronym for “Volatile Inflation, Less Expansionary,” while another says things are going to be EVIL (“Exacting period of Volatile Inflation and Low growth”).BBC News greets the end of the NICE decade with the question, “What’s the point of niceness?” Was the acronym an appropriate one to label Britain’s sustained economic boom, or is nice just too… nice?

Who Are You Calling “Sweetie”?
May 20, 2008
Last week on the Visual Thesaurus, William Safire and Nancy Friedman both weighed in on “Bittergate,” the political furor that arose over Senator Barack Obama’s comments about small-town Pennsylvanian voters (“It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion”). Now Obama has found himself under the microscope again for his use of a particular word, but this time the context is more “sweet” than “bitter.” Responding to a question from television reporter Peggy Agar at an automobile plant outside of Detroit, Obama said, “Hold on one second, sweetie.” Later he left Agar a voicemail apologizing about using the word sweetie to address her, calling it a “bad habit of mine.” Lisa Anderson of the Chicago Tribune wryly wrote, “Welcome to ‘Sweetie-gate,’ a place paved with eggshells, where terms of endearment turn into political peccadilloes at the drop of a diminutive.”

That’s Unconscionable, the Mayor Maintains
May 15, 2008
Our two-part interview with William Safire about the new edition of his Political Dictionary focused on the lasting contributions of political talk to the English lexicon. But sometimes the language of politics is more idiosyncratic. High-profile politicians who are speaking publicly on a daily basis inevitably develop their own verbal mannerisms, their peculiar linguistic likes and dislikes. Take New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, for instance. We’ve recently learned that he’s a big fan of the word unconscionable, but he’s got a problem with the word maintain.

“Procrastination”: Let’s Not Shilly-Shally!
May 13, 2008
Welcome to “Word Routes,” a new column where your fearless editor will chart a course through a sea of words. We’ll be looking at how new words emerge on the scene and how older ones have changed over time. Think of it as a series of dispatches from the frontlines of our dynamic and ever-shifting language. Often we’ll focus on a single word or phrase and tease apart the layers of meaning and usage, with the Visual Thesaurus wordmaps providing special insight. First up is a word near and dear to my heart: procrastination.

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Ben Zimmer is a regular contributor to Language Log, a group blog on language and linguistics. Subscribe to the feed of his Language Log posts here.

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“Because” with non-verbal complement
Jan. 24, 2014
The American Dialect Society’s recognition of because as Word of the Year has sparked a number of intriguing linguistic arguments.

Lumpatious lexicography
Jan. 13, 2014
In the latest episode of “Sam & Cat,” a teen comedy on Nickelodeon, the plot takes a lexicographical turn.

Dialect chat on MSNBC
Dec. 29, 2013
The interactive dialect quiz on the New York Times website, developed by Josh Katz from Bert Vaux and Scott Golder’s Harvard Dialect Survey, has proved to be immensely popular.

Can “[adjective]-ass” occur predicatively?
Nov. 18, 2013
One of the highlights of this weekend’s Saturday Night Live was a “Weekend Update” appearance by Taran Killam playing Jebidiah Atkinson, a 19th-century speech critic.

A fair-use victory for Google in these United States
Nov. 14, 2013
US Circuit Judge Denny Chin has ruled in favor of Google in its long-running copyright litigation with the Authors Guild over the scanning and digitization of books.

The return of Batman bin Suparman
Nov. 11, 2013
Back in 2008, an image got passed around the blogosphere showing the Singaporean identity card of one Batman bin Suparman.

“Schwa Fire” ventures into long-form language journalism
Nov. 6, 2013
For several years now, many linguists and their fellow travelers have talked about the need for a magazine about language issues that could capture the public attention.

Stanford remembers Ivan Sag
Sept. 28, 2013
As reported earlier this month by Arnold Zwicky, the world of linguistics lost Ivan Sag after a three-year fight against cancer.

Did Stalin really coin “American exceptionalism”?
Sept. 25, 2013
The phrase “American exceptionalism” has been much in the news ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote an op/ed piece in the New York Times taking issue with President Obama’s statement that America’s foreign policy “makes us exceptional.”

Colorless milk ports flap furiously
Sept. 5, 2013
On the Wall Street Journal’s Emerging Europe blog, Emre Peker reports on a case of linguistic chicanery, with none other than Noam Chomsky as its victim.

Language Log partners with Lexicon Valley on Slate
Sept. 4, 2013
For the past year and a half, Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield have been co-hosting the excellent Slate podcast Lexicon Valley, covering many Language Log-friendly topics (and interviewing a few Language Loggers in the process).

Getting worked up over “twerk”
Aug. 28, 2013
Perfect lexicographical storms don’t come along like this very often. On Sunday night, Miley Cyrus egregiously “twerked” at MTV’s Video Music Awards, in a performance that quickly became National Conversation #1 (even outpacing Syria).

X-iversaries everywhere
Aug. 24, 2013
Here are two anniversarial tweets that appeared Friday evening. The first is from the WhiteHouse.gov Technology account, celebrating the anniversary of the release of the source code for We the People

Manning’s pronouns
Aug. 22, 2013
Bradley Manning, just recently sentenced for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, has released a statement announcing, “I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female.” Manning also gave instructions on his-now-her preferred personal pronouns.

The New York Post goes verbless
Aug. 19, 2013
On Headsup: The Blog, FEV (Fred Vultee) notes a remarkable confluence of nouns (and one adjective) on the front page of Sunday’s New York Post.

Frances Brooke, destroyer of English (not literally)
Aug. 15, 2013
I don’t have much to say about the latest tempest in a teapot over the non-literal use of “literally.”

The “-bag” of “slutbag”
July 31, 2013
In an interview with Talking Points Memo, Barbara Morgan, spokeswoman for New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, called former Weiner intern Olivia Nuzzi all sorts of names after Nuzzi publicly criticized the campaign.

Rowling and “Galbraith”: an authorial analysis
July 16, 2013
The Sunday (UK) Times recently revealed that J.K. Rowling wrote the detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pen name Robert Galbraith.

No justice, no peace
July 15, 2013
J.P. Villanueva writes: “I’ve been seeing the old ‘No justice, no peace’ chant lately after the Zimmerman trial.”

Snowden’s United States: singular or plural?
July 1, 2013
Today Wikileaks posted a statement from Edward Snowden, time-stamped Monday July 1, 21:40 UTC.

New WSJ column: Word on the Street
June 28, 2013
For the past couple of years I’ve been writing a language column for The Boston Globe (and before that for The New York Times Magazine). Now I’m starting a new language column for The Wall Street Journal, called “Word on the Street.”

Scalia’s argle-bargle
June 27, 2013
Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the DOMA decision had some harsh words, to say the least, for the majority opinion. But the word everyone has been fixated on is rather light-hearted: argle-bargle.

About those dialect maps making the rounds…
June 6, 2013
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably already seen Business Insider’s “22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other.”

Parsing entertainment headlines
June 1, 2013
Here are two entertainment news headlines that are difficult to parse without knowing in advance what they’re reporting on.

A reprieve for DARE
May 8, 2013
A month ago, I posted an “SOS for DARE,” detailing the impending financial threat faced by the Dictionary of American Regional English, a national treasure of lexicography.

Offensive crash blossom
May 7, 2013
Steve Kleinedler spotted this crash blossom on the home page of the New York Times today: “G.O.P. Critics of Immigration Bill Plan Offensive.”

Obama’s “is is” redux
Apr. 30, 2013
Betty Ann Bardell tweets: “.@bgzimmer For those who missed the score from today’s W.H. Press Conf.: ‘is, is’ 5 – ‘as best as they can’ 1.”

Anatomy of a spambot
Apr. 23, 2013
We’ve often had occasion to wonder how spammy blog comments are linguistically constructed.

Cupertinos in the spotlight
Apr. 18, 2013
About seven years ago, in March 2006, I wrote a Language Log post about “the Cupertino effect,” a term to describe spellchecker-aided “miscorrections” that might turn, say, Pakistan’s Muttahida Quami Movement into the Muttonhead Quail Movement.

Attachment ambiguity in “Frazz”
Apr. 12, 2013
Today’s “Frazz” (via Ed Cormany on Twitter).

New NPR blog: Code Switch
Apr. 9, 2013
NPR has launched an engaging new blog called Code Switch.

SOS for DARE
Apr. 7, 2013
Many Language Log readers are no doubt familiar with the Dictionary of American Regional English, which I hailed in a Boston Globe column last year as “a great project on how Americans speak — make that the great project on how Americans speak.”

John J. Gumperz, 1922-2013
Apr. 2, 2013
John J. Gumperz, the Berkeley sociolinguist who, among his many contributions, introduced “the speech community” as a unit of linguistic analysis, died on Friday at the age of 91.

Calvert Watkins, 1933-2013
Mar. 29, 2013
The great Indo-Europeanist Calvert Watkins passed away in his sleep on the evening of March 20.

The cyberpragmatics of bounding asterisks
Feb. 7, 2013
On Daring Fireball, John Gruber noticed something interesting about David Pogue’s New York Times review of the Surface Pro: what he calls “the use of bounding asterisks for emphasis around the coughs.”

Infant involved in crash blossom
Jan. 24, 2013
A commenter on FARK noted this headline on the website for KMOV St. Louis: “Infant pulled from wrecked car involved in short police pursuit.”

Remembering Aaron Swartz (and Infogami)
Jan. 14, 2013
There have been many online remembrances of Aaron Swartz, the brilliant young programmer and Internet activist who killed himself on Friday at the age of 26.

Snow words in the comics
Jan. 13, 2013
Coincidentally, two syndicated comic strips running today riff off of the old “Eskimo words for snow” canard.

ADS Word of the Year: “hashtag”
Jan. 5, 2013
The American Dialect Society (meeting in Boston in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America) has chosen its Word of the Year for 2012: hashtag.

On letting one’s guard (and pants) down
Nov. 11, 2012
Mark Liberman noted (as did Neal Whitman on his Literal-Minded blog) a case of syllepsis in an Atlantic piece by Conor Friedersdorf: “What conservative Washington Post readers got, when they traded in Dave Weigel for [Jennifer] Rubin, was a lot more hackery and a lot less informed about the presidential election.”

“We are all the other now”
Nov. 8, 2012
Writing recently for the online Ideas section of Time, Jeffrey Kluger took on the “We are all X (now)” trope, or as it’s called in these parts, a snowclone.

“Too much Obama vote”
Nov. 7, 2012
For the linguistically sensitive, one of the burning questions stemming from last night’s election-night coverage was, “When did vote become a mass noun?”

Don’t be discouraged from not voting
Nov. 6, 2012
Ben Yagoda spotted a nice case of overnegation on NPR’s “Morning Edition” earlier today, when Renee Montagne interviewed political science professor Michael McDonald about early voting.

The he’s and she’s of Twitter
Nov. 6, 2012
My latest column for the Boston Globe is about some fascinating new research presented by Tyler Schnoebelen at the recent NWAV 41 conference at Indiana University Bloomington.

“Oppan Chomsky Style”
Oct. 27, 2012
Somehow, Language Log has yet to take notice of the international sensation that is “Gangnam Style,” the deliciously weird Korean pop video that currently has more than 560 million views on YouTube.

Newborn searches for crash blossom
Oct. 20, 2012
Amy Reynaldo spotted this crash blossom currently featured on the home page of the Chicago Tribune.

A new chapter for Google Ngrams
Oct. 18, 2012
When Google’s Ngram Viewer was launched in December 2010 it encouraged everyone to be an amateur computational linguist, an amateur historical lexicographer, or a little of both. Today, the public interface that allows users to plumb the Google Books megacorpus has been relaunched, and the new version makes it even more enticing to researchers, both scholarly and nonscholarly.

Bipartisanship (the bad kind)
Sept. 30, 2012
Some news about the presidential debates from Politico, as reported by Dylan Byers: “Philips Electronics has dropped its sponsorship of the 2012 presidential debates, citing a desire not to associate itself with bipartisanship, POLITICO has learned.”

Panel on Digital Dictionaries (MLA/LSA/ADS)
Sept. 26, 2012
Eric Baković has noted the happy confluence of the annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America and the Modern Language Association, both scheduled for January 3-6, 2013 at sites within reasonable walking distance of each other in Boston.

Ambiguity watch: failing families, killing New Yorkers
Sept. 17, 2012
Here are two items of ambiguity in advertising, one intentional and one not. First the apparently unintentional ambiguity: a new commercial from the Romney presidential campaign entitled “Failing American Families.”

A cautionary vision of things to come
Sept. 14, 2012
Randall Munroe’s latest xkcd strip.

Sounding the alarm on the subjunctive
Sept. 11, 2012
From the After Deadline blog of Phil Corbett, style guru at the New York Times, comes this 1924 letter to the editor calling for a Congressional investigation into the imperiled state of the English subjunctive

Remembering Neil Armstrong and his “one small step”
Aug. 26, 2012
Since the death of Neil Armstrong on Saturday, many remembrances have told the story about his famously flubbed first words on the moon.

Rendering “Pussy Riot” in Russian
Aug. 18, 2012
With the international attention given to the trial and conviction of members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot on charges of “hooliganism,” many have wondered online whether Pussy Riot is a translation of a Russian name.

The return of the “next president” flub
Aug. 11, 2012
Introducing Paul Ryan as his running mate this morning, Mitt Romney made a gaffe that was remarkably similar to one that Barack Obama made four years ago when he introduced Joe Biden as his running mate.

Celebrating “Kromowidjojo”
Aug. 3, 2012
The winner of the women’s 100-meter freestyle swimming event at the London Olympics is the wonderfully named Ranomi Kromowidjojo of the Netherlands.

“Would you repeat that in Yiddish and Vietnamese and French?”
Aug. 2, 2012
Today, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing on H.R. 997, the “English Language Unity Act of 2011” sponsored by Rep. Steve King [R-IA].

Stewart on “You didn’t build that,” Colbert on “Anglo-Saxon heritage”
July 26, 2012
The late-night shows on Comedy Central both took a linguistic turn last night.

Artistic touristic linguistics
July 18, 2012
Andrew Spitz and Momo Miyazaki, students at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, posted this charming video of their cross-linguistic art project:

Another unfortunate crash blossom
July 17, 2012
“KOMO headline editor, your phrasing needs work,” tweeted CJ Alexander regarding this deeply regrettable crash blossom (KOMO North Seattle News, July 11, 2012).

Diving deeper into the metaphorical molasses
July 15, 2012
My column in Sunday’s Boston Globe is on a popular topic here at Language Log Plaza: the multitudinous metaphors spun to explain the Higgs boson discovery to a non-scientific audience.

Tawking the tawk, wawking the wawk
July 8, 2012
Matt Flegenheimer, “A Voice of New York’s Streets, Saying That It’s Safe to Wawk” (New York Times, 7/7/2012).

The broccoli horrible
June 29, 2012
I was first struck by the expression “parade of horribles” back in April 2008, when then-Senator Barack Obama used it to describe testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about what might happen if U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq too hastily.

“U.S. Supreme Court says upholds health care mandate”
June 28, 2012
That was the tweet sent out this morning by Reuters, which got the news out about the Supreme Court decision at 10:07:43 Eastern Daylight Time, evidently just 12 seconds after Bloomberg beat them to it.

Personal electronic deDeputys
June 10, 2012
On the heels of the notorious Nooking of War and Peace, Shane Horan sends along “a priceless search-and-replace error on the rules page of an Irish secondary school.”

“It was as if a light had been Nookd…”
June 1, 2012
Here on Language Log we’ve often talked about unfortunate search-and-replace miscorrections, which now seem to be infecting poorly edited e-reader texts. The latest example, via Kendra Albert on Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet blog, is a doozy.

The New Yorker vs. the descriptivist specter
May 29, 2012
Readers of The New Yorker might be getting the impression that the magazine has it in for a nefarious group of people known as “descriptivists.”

Translinguistic taboo avoidance: Arabicizing “Ayrault”
May 17, 2012
Bloomberg reports (rather delicately) that the name of France’s new prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, is causing a bit of problem when it is transliterated into Arabic: “When spoken, his family name is colloquial Arabic in many countries for the third-person singular possessive form of the male sex organ.”

Hyperbolic lots
May 2, 2012
For the past couple of years, Google has provided automatic captioning for all YouTube videos, using a speech-recognition system similar to the one that creates transcriptions for Google Voice messages.

Rapper 50 Cent converted into Malaysian currency
Apr. 20, 2012
Making the rounds today, from Andrew Bloch’s Twitter feed.

The first “asshole” in the Times?
Apr. 16, 2012
In “Larkin v. the Gray Lady,” Mark Liberman credits a Language Log reader with pointing out that “the NYT printed asshole for the first time a couple of weeks ago” (“Race, Tragedy and Outrage Collide After a Shot in Florida”, 4/1/2012).

Tasty cupertinos
Apr. 11, 2012
A correction from The New York Times on Damon Darlin’s article, “Economic Theory Plots a Course for Good Food” (4/10/12 online, p. D3 in the 4/11/12 print edition).

Three scenes in the life of “meh”
Feb. 26, 2012
When I first posted here in 2006 about the indifferent interjection meh (“Meh-ness to society”) I never imagined that this unobtrusive monosyllable would provide such rich linguistic fodder for years to come.

“Downton Abbey” anachronisms: beyond nitpickery
Feb. 13, 2012
I’ve been taking advantage of the rabid interest in “Downton Abbey” lately to report on some verbal anachronisms that have cropped up in the show’s second season (originally broadcast on ITV in the UK late last year and now wrapping on PBS in the US).

A multilingual book trailer
Feb. 10, 2012
These days, newly published books often get promoted with video trailers, and there’s one that just came out for Michael Erard’s Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners.

Nominees for 2011 Word of the Year
Jan. 6, 2012
The American Dialect Society (meeting in Portland in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America) has selected nominees in the various categories for the 2011 Word of the Year.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang: An Appeal
Dec. 31, 2011
In the April 3, 2011 issue of the New York Times Book Review, I appraised Jonathon Green’s wonderfully comprehensive three-volume reference work, Green’s Dictionary of Slang (GDoS to its friends).

Transitive “disappear”? Not in this country!
Dec. 22, 2011
The latest installment of Ruben Bolling’s political cartoon “Tom the Dancing Bug” takes the form of a satirical information sheet, “So… You’ve Been Indefinitely Detained!”

Another Newt “not”
Dec. 11, 2011
Once again on the Newt negation watch… In last night’s Republican debate in Iowa, Gingrich defended his previous support of an individual mandate for health care insurance.

Newt’s not not engaging
Dec. 11, 2011
ABC is proving itself to be the Newt not network. Earlier this month, Newt Gingrich provided a puzzling (but technically correct) instance of negation in an interview with Jake Tapper of ABC News.

The Beeb’s latest crash blossom
Dec. 8, 2011
BBC News is a reliable source for the misleading headlines we know as crash blossoms.

Newt’s negation
Dec. 2, 2011
Geoff Pullum is, of course, right on the money when he points out that our frequent difficulties in interpreting multiple negations indicate that we are all “semantic over-achievers, trying to use languages that are quite a bit beyond our intellectual powers.”

The “Word of the Year” need not be a word
Nov. 23, 2011
My colleague Geoff Pullum has objected to the selection of squeezed middle as Oxford Dictionaries’ 2011 Word of the Year on the grounds that “the ‘Word of the Year’ should be a word.” Allow me to provide a counterpoint to this view.

“Don’t you know it’s not just the Eskimo”
Nov. 14, 2011
Last month, in the post “‘Words for snow’ watch,” I reported that Kate Bush’s new album (out Nov. 21) is called 50 Words for Snow.

Another milestone for “eggcorn”
Nov. 3, 2011
Eggcorn, that most successful of Language Log’s neoLogisms, has entered another major dictionary.

On the front lines of Twitter linguistics
Oct. 30, 2011
I have a piece in today’s New York Times Sunday Review section, “Twitterology: A New Science?”

“Chinglish” hits Broadway
Oct. 27, 2011
Tonight is the opening night for a new Broadway play called “Chinglish.”

Lightning strike crash blossom
Oct. 27, 2011
Josh Fruhlinger sends along a sublime crash blossom from BBC News: “Dog helps lightning strike Redruth mayor.”

Censoring “Occupy” in China
Oct. 24, 2011
Last weekend I was on the NPR show “On the Media” to talk about how the word occupy has evolved since the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement in mid-September.

“Words for snow” watch
Oct. 14, 2011
It’s been a while since we’ve rounded up public appearances of the old “Eskimo words for snow” myth. Here are a few recent examples that have been sent in to Language Log Plaza.

“So what if/that…”
Oct. 8, 2011
From the AP wire… ARLINGTON, Texas (AP)—So what that the Texas Rangers won their only game this season against Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander.

Who Put the X in AXB: Snowclone Follies of 1912
Oct. 2, 2011
Inspired by Mark Liberman’s post, “Putting the X in AXB,” I spent some time trying to find the origin for this venerable snowclone.

The elusive triple “is”
Sept. 25, 2011
Last month (“Xtreme Isisism”, 8/13/11), Mark Liberman analyzed a TED talk by Kevin Slavin, a speaker who is particularly prone to copula-doubling (“the point IS IS that…”, “the reality IS IS that…”, etc.)

Sequoyah’s syllabary, from parchment to iPad
Sept. 21, 2011
In a great use of comic art, Roy Boney Jr. has created a graphic feature for the magazine Indian Country Today about the history of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah in the early 19th century.

Shel Silverstein’s hot dog and the domain of “everything”
Sept. 20, 2011
A posthumous collection of Shel Silverstein’s poems and drawings has just been published, with the title Every Thing On It.

Annals of “needs washed”
Sept. 9, 2011
Grammar Girl (aka Mignon Fogarty) has posted a podcast today about the “needs washed” regionalism, which is mostly associated with the North Midland dialect region of the U.S.

The Mock Spanglish of @ElBloombito
Aug. 29, 2011
If nothing else, Hurricane Irene leaves us with the legacy of a fine fake-Twitter account, @ElBloombito (aka “Miguel Bloombito”), which takes satirical aim at the Spanish-language announcements that New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg appended to the end of his many hurricane-related press conferences.

Microsoft tech writing noun pile blog post madness!
Aug. 4, 2011
Fans of noun piles will enjoy the recent blog post by Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft, “Fun (or not) with noun stacks.” Mike shares a few of the lovely compound noun pileups he’s encountered on the job.

The idiom police, if you will
July 2, 2011
Today’s “Candorville,” by Darrin Bell.

The pleasures of recursive acronymy
June 28, 2011
The latest xkcd.

“Speaks Mandarin Chinese, and Hokkien… whatever that is.”
June 21, 2011
Jon Huntsman, formerly the governor of Utah and ambassador to China, announced he was running for the Republican presidential nomination at a campaign kickoff event today at Liberty State Park in fair Jersey City.

Gil Scott-Heron’s old-fashioned ghetto code
May 28, 2011
Gil Scott-Heron died yesterday at the age of 62 — a remarkable performer whose politically charged combination of music and poetry had an enormous influence on the development of hip-hop culture.

“You want punched out?”
May 25, 2011
Today’s political buzz is all about the win by Democrat Kathy Hochul in New York’s 26th congressional district, encompassing suburbs northeast of Buffalo and west of Rochester.

Unsucking the suck
Apr. 19, 2011
On The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog, Eileen Reynolds writes about a site called “Unsuck It” that translates corporatese: “You type in a particularly odious word or phrase—’incentivize,’ say—and ‘Unsuck It’ spits out the plain-English equivalent, along with a sentence for context.”

She’s got two sibilants, no bilabial plosives
Apr. 17, 2011
Time for some pop-music phonology! Erin McKean directs our attention to a video for “Saskia Hamilton,” a song by Ben Folds and Nick Hornby from their 2010 album Lonely Avenue. The video is performed by Charlie McDonnell, known on YouTube as “charlieissocoollike.”

Incomprehensible Shouting Named Official U.S. Language
Mar. 5, 2011
From The Onion News Network.

Now on The Atlantic: The corpus in the court
Mar. 4, 2011
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled in FCC v. AT&T that corporations are not entitled to a right of “personal privacy,” even if corporations can be construed as “persons.”

Popular Linguistics, Issue 2
Feb. 22, 2011
The second issue of Popular Linguistics Magazine, a new online venture edited by DS Bigham, has hit the intertubes.

Could Watson parse a snowclone?
Feb. 17, 2011
Today on The Atlantic I break down Watson’s big win over the humans in the Jeopardy!/IBM challenge.

How Mubarak was told to go, in many languages
Feb. 13, 2011
In the New York Times Week in Review this weekend, I have a piece looking at the clever linguistic strategies that Egyptian protesters used to tell President Hosni Mubarak that it was time to go.

Correction of the Year?
Feb. 7, 2011
This is almost too good to be true. Via The Media Blog, here’s a correction that ran in Australia’s Morning Bulletin.

LanguageLoggingHeads: SOTU edition
Jan. 26, 2011
Last September, the folks at Bloggingheads.tv brought John McWhorter and me together for a spirited dialog (sorry, diavlog) on a range of language issues.

Gov. Cuomo and our poor monkey brains
Jan. 21, 2011
My latest reader response for The New York Times Magazine’s On Language column tackles a turn of phrase that has come up on Language Log many times: cannot be underestimated.

Introducing: Popular Linguistics Magazine
Jan. 16, 2011
A new online venture has just been launched: Popular Linguistics Magazine.

Nominees for 2010 Word of the Year
Jan. 7, 2011
The American Dialect Society (meeting in Pittsburgh in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America) has selected nominees in the various categories for Word of the Year.

On “culturomics” and “ngrams”
Dec. 23, 2010
I’m still mulling over the blockbuster “culturomics” paper published in Science last week and ably addressed here by Geoff Nunberg and oMark Liberman.

Frienditute
Dec. 1, 2010
Today’s Dilbert (12/01/10): Here, the -itute of prostitute is serving as a blend component, but could it end up becoming what Arnold Zwicky has helpfully dubbed a “libfix” (a “liberated” word part that yields new word-forming elements)?

Site-seeing miners
Nov. 20, 2010
Earlier today, the homepage of CNN.com featured the headline, “Chile miners take in sites across L.A.”

Mozzareller sticks
Nov. 19, 2010
Via The Economist’s Johnson blog comes this entertaining video of the young stars of the “Harry Potter” movie franchise trying to sound American.

Kiwi crash blossom
Nov. 11, 2010
The crash blossom of the day comes to us from Rebekah Macdonald via Twitter. This headline appeared on the New Zealand news site Stuff.co.nz: Police chase driver in hospital.

Obama’s Indonesian: the grand finale
Nov. 10, 2010
At the end of his abbreviated trip to Indonesia (cut short because of the volcanic eruptions of Mt. Merapi), President Obama gave a half-hour address at the University of Indonesia that finally showed off his skills in the Indonesian language, a subject we’ve been examining.

Obama’s Indonesian pleasantries: now with food!
Nov. 9, 2010
In January 2009, soon after President Obama was sworn in, we had our first video evidence of his conversational skills in Indonesian, based on an exchange he had with a State Department staffer.

Miscorrecting Palin
Nov. 5, 2010
Sarah Palin’s Twitter feed continues to attract a mind-bogglng amount of international media attention, most recently for the act of “favoriting” a tweet from Ann Coulter, which contained a photograph of a church sign with inflammatory things to say about President Obama.

Zoological analogies
Oct. 27, 2010
Back in 2003, Mark Liberman recounted a line attributed to Roman Jakobson when asked if Harvard should give Vladimir Nabokov a faculty position: I do respect very much the elephant, but would you give him the chair of Zoology?

Five years of “truthiness”
Oct. 15, 2010
My latest On Language column for The New York Times Magazine celebrates the fifth anniversary of Stephen Colbert’s (re)invention of “truthiness” — a word we began tracking here on Language Log soon after it appeared on the premiere episode of “The Colbert Report.”

Bloggingheads: Language and Thought
Oct. 11, 2010
A few weeks after John McWhorter and I participated in a “diavlog” on Bloggingheads, the site is hosting another language-y conversation between Joshua Knobe of Yale and Lera Boroditsky of Stanford.

R.I.P., Mock Obituaries
Oct. 1, 2010
On September 30, 2010, a journalistic genre passed away: the mock obituary marking the purported demise of a linguistic phenomenon. According to the coroner’s report, the cause of death was rampant overuse.

MacArthur Fellowships for two linguists
Sept. 28, 2010
Of the 23 recipients of the 2010 MacArthur Fellowships (the so-called “genius grants”), two are linguists: Jessie Little Doe Baird, program director of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, and Carol Padden, a professor in the Communications Department at the University of California San Diego who specializes in sign languages.

Meta-snowclones for gastro-geeks
Sept. 23, 2010
The granddaddy of all snowclones has often been expressed here at Language Log Plaza as a formula with variables: If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z.

Whorfian tourism
Sept. 23, 2010
We’ve often seen how pop-Whorfian depictions of linguistic difference rely on the facile “no word for X” trope — see our long list of examples here.

LanguageLoggingHeads
Sept. 16, 2010
Bloggingheads, home of the “diavlog,” is now featuring a discussion that I had with fellow Language Logger John McWhorter about a whole range of linguistic issues, from lexical chunking to pop-Whorfianism to Obama’s Indonesian skills to the language of Mad Men. Something for everyone!

“Eggcorn” makes the OED
Sept. 16, 2010
This is an auspicious moment: a Language Log-ism has been entered into the Oxford English Dictionary. The latest quarterly update for the online revision of the OED includes this note.

Further “warning”
Sept. 12, 2010
Geoff Pullum was rightly baffled by Simon Heffer’s recent pronouncement that sentences like The Prime Minister has warned that spending cuts are necessary are ungrammatical, since the verb warn, Heffer imagines, must always be transitive.

The ventious crapests pounted raditally
Aug. 22, 2010
The comments on my recent post, “Making linguistics relevant (for sports blogs)” meandered into a discussion of linguistic example sentences that display morphosyntactic patterning devoid of semantic content.

Making linguistics relevant (for sports blogs)
Aug. 21, 2010
The popular sports blog Deadspin isn’t the first place you’d expect to find a lesson in inflectional morphology. So it was a bit of a surprise to see the recent post “Learn Linguistics the Latrell Sprewell Way,” featuring this shot of a linguistics textbook.

“Pure” Inuit language, and bucking the snow-word trend
Aug. 12, 2010
The Guardian has an article today entitled, “Linguist on mission to save Inuit ‘fossil language’ disappearing with the ice,” about a forthcoming research trip by University of Cambridge linguist Stephen Pax Leonard to study Inuktun, an endangered Polar Inuit language spoken by the Inughuit community of northwest Greenland.

Dictionary daftness, Dan Brown style
Aug. 10, 2010
Perhaps you saw the outrageous headline from The Daily Telegraph last week: “Secret vault of words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered”!

“Bohemian Rhapsody”: Bismillah or… Mitch Miller?
Aug. 2, 2010
The Associated Press obituary for Mitch Miller includes this highly questionable tidbit: “Miller’s square reputation in the post-rock era brought his name and music to unexpected places… During Queen’s nonsensical camp classic, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ the group chants ‘Mitch MILL-uh!’ as if to affirm the song’s absurdity.”

Lou Gehrig’s crash blossom
July 31, 2010
Arijit Guha spotted this remarkable crash blossom on the CNN website: “Lou Gehrig’s victim: Kill me for my organs.”

Antedating “refudiate”
July 27, 2010
If you haven’t quite yet gotten your fill after last week’s refudiate-fest, I return to the Palinism in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus.

More on the early days of obscenicons
July 24, 2010
Last week I posted about the early history of cartoon cursing characters, aka grawlixes, aka obscenicons. I had managed to unearth examples of obscenicons on comics pages going back to 1909, from Rudolph Dirks’ “The Katzenjammer Kids.”

The language of “Mad Men” and the perils of self-expurgation
July 22, 2010
My latest “On Language” column in The New York Times Magazine (along with a followup Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus) takes an in-depth look at the language of “Mad Men,” the critically acclaimed AMC show that begins its fourth season on Sunday.

Obscenicons a century ago
July 17, 2010
Mark Liberman recently asked, “What was the earliest use of mixed typographical symbols (as opposed to uniform asterisks or underlining) to represent (part or all of) taboo words?” The use of such symbols appears to have originated as a comic-strip convention.

Capping off the spill with a crash blossom
July 16, 2010
While we’re on the subject of grammatically ambiguous oil spill headlines, Larry Horn sends along a nice crash blossom (via the American Dialect Society mailing list).

Oops: a listening guide
June 28, 2010
The latest installment of WNYC’s show Radiolab is entitled “Oops,” and it’s about how we so often get tripped up by the unintended consequences of our actions. Hosts Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad brought me in to the studio to share some classic word-processing Oops-es.

A treat for fans of eggcorns and crosswords
June 27, 2010
If you have even a passing interest in crosswords, you may know the legendary name of Merl Reagle, whose syndicated Sunday puzzle appears in many major newspapers (the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, etc.).

Fashionably many Icelandic words for snow
June 25, 2010
Spotted by Jonathan Lighter on a recent trip to Iceland: “A big ad for 66°North fashions, prominently displayed at Keflavik Airport, telling passengers everywhere that ‘There are over [a] 100 words for snow in Icelandic. Only one for what to wear.'”

Manute Bol and the “language experts”
June 22, 2010
Five years ago, Geoff Pullum wrote a post here entitled, “Pick-up basketballism reaches Ivy League faculty vocabulary,” about the spread of the apologetic interjection “my bad.”

“The small people” = “den lilla människan”?
June 17, 2010
BP’s chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg has been taken to task for a statement he made to reporters after a meeting with President Obama and other White House officials: “I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are really companies that don’t care, but that is not the case in BP, we care about the small people.”

Terwilliger bunts one
May 20, 2010
Earlier I posted a video of UK football commentator (and former Hull striker) Dean Windass recapping some play in a Premier League match between Everton and Portsmouth.

At the cutting edge of broadcasting
May 20, 2010
A video from Today’s Big Thing, under the headline, “Soccer Reporter Invents New Kind of English.”

Fanboys: the techie put-down and the bogus acro-mnemonic
May 19, 2010
In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I take a look at Harry McCracken’s excellent historical analysis of the word fanboy, from something of an in-joke among underground cartoonists in the ’70s to an all-purpose techie put-down in the ’00s.

وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر leads the non-Latin charge
May 6, 2010
The first Internet domain names using non-Latin characters are being rolled out, a plan put into motion after approval from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Combating the monolithic tree mushroom stem squid
May 3, 2010
The New York Times reports on efforts by Shanghai officials to crack down on Chinglish, but the prospects are daunting.

Crash blossom du jour, from the Beeb
Apr. 28, 2010
The top headline in the Business section of BBC News currently reads: Greece fears batter markets again.

Feline ambulation and volcanic nomenclature
Apr. 22, 2010
From The Oatmeal… As Kate notes in the comments, Geoff Pullum evoked the “kitten on the keyboard” image a week ago.

Revenge, literally speaking
Apr. 8, 2010
The latest xkcd: (For more on non-literal literally, see here, here, and here.)

40 words for “next”
Apr. 2, 2010
This is from an actual job listing on BusinessWorkforce.com, advertising a position at the “marketing innovations agency” Ignited.

Mangling the prostidude
Mar. 28, 2010
The Associated Press reports: “Brothel owner Jim Davis said Friday his Shady Lady Ranch had parted ways with the nation’s first ‘prostitude.'” Prostitude? Really?

How Language Log helped jump-start a subculture
Mar. 24,  2010
Arika Okrent, author of the wonderful book In the Land of Invented Languages, has a new article on Slate about the burgeoning community of Avatar fans who have become obsessed with the movie’s alien language, Na’vi.

The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes
Mar. 9, 2010
The crash-blossom-y headline that Geoff Pullum just posted about, “Google’s Computer Might Betters Translation Tool,” has been changed in the online edition of the New York Times to something more sensible.

Sorry, Sgt. Sarver
Mar. 4, 2010
Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver has filed a lawsuit against the makers of the film The Hurt Locker, claiming that screenwriter Mark Boal based the film’s central character on him after Boal was embedded in Sarver’s bomb squad unit in Iraq.

Annals of opaque sports metaphors
Feb. 21, 2010
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” this morning, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty grasped for a baseball metaphor in this exchange with David Gregory (see the end of this video clip).

AgreementFail
Feb. 20,  2010
Here is one of today’s top headlines on the AP wire: “GOP’s 2012 hopefuls crowd town they loves to hate.”

Hopey changey… or changing?
Feb. 11, 2010
Via Talking Points Memo comes this correction from the Los Angeles Times: “In some editions of Sunday’s Section A, an article about Sarah Palin’s speech to the National Tea Party Convention quoted her as saying, ‘How’s that hopey, changing stuff working out for you?'”

Odium against “podium” revisited
Feb. 6, 2010
Four years ago I wrote a Language Log post looking into the use of podium as a verb at the Winter Olympics in Torino — and the often extreme reactions that the usage evoked.

Indie-Pop Manglish
Jan. 24, 2010
Over the weekend, one of the guests on the NPR Show “Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen” was the Malaysian singer-songwriter Zee Avi, who managed to convert YouTube buzz into an indie recording contract and a well-received debut album.

Of Pogue and plosives and palates
Jan. 22, 2010
New York Times tech columnist David Pogue went 1 for 2 on his phonetic terminology in his latest article, “Packing a Series of Pluses.”

An ursine crash blossom
Jan. 20, 2010
Via Wonkette and The Raw Story comes this shocking political headline from Reuters: “White House Says Bears Part Of Blame For Senate Loss.” One can only imagine what Stephen Colbert will have to say about this.

“My friends thou hast defriended”
Jan. 19, 2010
The winner of the 2009 Dutch Word of the Year, as selected by an online poll conducted by the Van Dale dictionary group and Pers newspaper, was ontvrienden, a social networking verb equivalent to English unfriend or defriend.

The “Team X” meme
Jan. 12, 2010
Fans of Conan O’Brien, who announced he wouldn’t accept NBC’s plan to move “The Tonight Show” to midnight, have flooded Twitter with the #teamconan hashtag.

“Tweet” Word of the Year, “Google” Word of the Decade
Jan. 8, 2010
The results are in: the American Dialect Society has selected tweet as the Word of the Year for 2009, and google (the verb) as Word of the Decade for 2000-09.

Expurgating the Facebook fugitive
Jan. 8, 2010
Adrian Bailey passes along an interesting bit of editorial expurgation that appeared in a Washington Post article about Craig “Lazie” Lynch, who recently escaped from prison in Suffolk, England.

Nominees for ADS Word of the Year (and Decade)
Jan. 8, 2010
Last night, the American Dialect Society (meeting in Baltimore in conjunction with the Linguistics Society of America) selected the final nominees for Word of the Year (2009) and Word of the Decade (2000-09).

Leading the league in snowclones
Dec. 28, 2009
Snowclones, in Geoff Pullum’s early formulation, were defined as “some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists.”

Vowel chart body art
Dec. 26, 2009
Before I had even met American Heritage Dictionary supervising editor Steve Kleinedler, I knew about his tattoo. A 2005 New York Times article about the young Turks of American lexicography revealed that Steve “has a phonetic vowel chart tattooed across his back.”

Some highlights of Na’vi
Dec. 18, 2009
James Cameron’s sci-fi blockbuster Avatar opens this weekend with much fanfare. As has widely been reported, Cameron enlisted a linguist, Paul Frommer of USC’s Marshall School of Business, to create the Na’vi language, spoken by the the inhabitants of the alien world Pandora.

Palin and her elk
Dec. 10, 2009
Via Nancy Friedman’s Twitter feed comes this lovely eggcorn, in a comment on the New York Times Opinionator blog: “NOW and others have nothing to offer the average Jane and in consequence, have allowed Sarah Palin and her elk to define women’s issues.”

Going quant
Nov. 23, 2009
From “Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?” by Anand Giridharadas (New York Times/International Herald Tribune, 11/21/09): “Wall Street has gone quant, with financial models automating trading — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes disastrously.”

Happy Web Day!
Nov. 12, 2009
In my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, I consider the enormous linguistic impact of an internal memorandum published at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on November 12, 1990.

The Cadillac of snowclones
Nov. 9, 2009
In Sunday’s “On Language” column in The New York Times Magazine, I use the recent discussion in Congress about “Cadillac health plans” as a news hook to consider the transferred usage of Cadillac in general.

Horn on personal datives
Nov. 5, 2009
Mark Liberman’s post, “On beyond personal datives?”, has generated quite a bit of discussion in the comments section, much of it related to Larry Horn’s paper, “‘I love me some him’: The landscape of non-argument datives.”

The Gubernator’s acrostic mischief
Oct. 28, 2009
Via The Swamp, the Chicago Tribune’s political blog, comes news of an awesome (if spiteful) bit of gubernatorial wordplay from the office of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Snowe-clone
Oct. 15, 2009
Stephen Colbert on Olympia Snowe (Colbert Report, Oct. 14): “We are now one step closer to a nightmare future where everyone has health insurance. And I will tell you who I blame. Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, the only Republican who voted in favor of the bill.”

“Annoying word” poll results: Whatever!
Oct. 8, 2009
Proving once again that peevology is the most popular form of metalinguistic discourse in the US, the media yesterday was all over a poll from the Marist Institute of Public Opinion, purporting to reveal the words and phrases that Americans find most annoying.

Further thoughts on the Language Maven
Oct. 5, 2009
In this Sunday’s “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine (already available online here), I take a look back at the legacy of the column’s founder, William Safire.

BBC signals crash blossom threat
Oct. 4, 2009
Josh Fruhlinger sends along today’s entry in the “crash blossom” sweepstakes, a headline from the BBC News website: “SNP signals debate legal threat.”

William Safire, 1929-2009
Sept. 27, 2009
William Safire has passed away, and it is no small measure of his impact that even linguabloggers who were most critical of his “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine (Languagehat, Mr. Verb, Wishydig) have been quick to post their sincere condolences.

WTF? No, TFW!
Sept. 24, 2009
The comments on my post “The inherent ambiguity of WTF” drifted to other possible expansions of WTF, like the World Taekwondo Federation. That reminded me of something I saw back in July on the blog Your Logo Makes Me Barf, mocking the abbreviatory logo of the Wisconsin Tourism Federation.

The inherent ambiguity of “WTF”
Sept. 24, 2009
I’d like to echo Arnold Zwicky’s praise for the third edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s fan-fucking-tastic dictionary, The F Word.

Crash blossom du jour
Sept. 23, 2009
A crash blossom, you’ll recall, is an infelicitously worded headline that leads the reader down the garden path. Here’s a fine example from today’s Associated Press headlines: “McDonald’s fries the holy grail for potato farmers.”

More curve-bending
Sept. 16, 2009
Following up on Mark’s post about William Safire’s latest On Language column, “Bending the curve,” I wanted to share some of the citational history of this particular idiom, as I’ve been able to piece it together.

Goo goo goo joob, coo coo ca-choo, boop-oop-a-doop
Sept. 8, 2009
Just in time for the rollout of the Beatles remasters and the “Beatles: Rock Band” video game, my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus takes on “goo goo goo joob” (that’s how it appears in the Magical Mystery Tour lyric sheet), “coo coo ca-choo,” and, for good measure, “boop-oop-a-doop.”

Crash blossoms
Aug. 26, 2009
From John McIntyre: You’ve heard about the Cupertino. You have seen the eggcorn. You know about the snowclone. Now — flourish by trumpets and hautboys — we have the crash blossom.

Bloggingheads: Of Cronkiters and corpora, of fishapods and FAIL
Aug. 22, 2009
My brother Carl, a science writer who blogs over at The Loom, has a regular gig on Bloggingheads.tv, interviewing science-y folks for “Science Saturday.”

Computational eggcornology
Aug. 17, 2009
Chris Waigl, keeper of the Eggcorn Database, brings to our attention a paper that was presented at CALC-09 (Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity).

Fry’s English Delight: So Wrong It’s Right
Aug. 11, 2009
Stephen Fry — British comedian, quiz show host, and public intellectual — has just started a new series of his BBC Radio 4 program on the English language, “Fry’s English Delight.”

The “moist” chronicles, continued
Aug. 8, 2009
People’s aversion to the word moist has attracted our attention for a while now (most recently in this post — see also the links in this one).

“Cronkiter” debunkorama!
Aug. 5, 2009
It started off, simply enough, as a comment by Language Log reader Lugubert, who questioned a linguafactoid reported in the Associated Press obituary for Walter Cronkite.

“Cronkiter” update
July 31, 2009
As I reported here earlier this week, I used my most recent Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus to debunk a widely circulated myth about Walter Cronkite.

On “Cronkiters” and “Kronkiters”
July 26, 2009
It was widely reported in Walter Cronkite’s obituaries that “Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters; In Holland, they are Cronkiters.”

Walter Leland Mr. Cronkite
July 17, 2009
When a big news story is breaking, like the passing of Walter Cronkite, it’s not surprising that reporters and editors might be a little hasty in getting the word out.

The living history of Palin’s “dead fish”
July 8, 2009
In two recent posts, Mark Liberman has investigated the religious echoes in expressions from Sarah Palin: “I know that I know that I know” and “If I die, I die.”

Birth of a euphemism: “Hiking the Appalachian trail”
July 1, 2009
Here at Language Log Plaza, we’ve been following the linguistic angles of the Gov. Mark Sanford story ever since he mysteriously went “out of pocket.”

Doing stupid
June 30, 2009
It’s not quite as ineffably koan-like as “The biggest self of self is self,” but Gov. Mark Sanford delivered another parsing puzzler in his latest comments to the Associated Press.

Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa
June 26, 2009
Ever since Michael Jackson’s unexpected death yesterday, his music has been omnipresent.

Slang affixation: it’s all mystery-y-ish-y
June 24, 2009
If you haven’t picked up a copy of Michael Adams’ new book, Slang: The People’s Poetry, well, what are you waiting for?

The first proposal for “Ms.” (1901)
June 23, 2009
It’s been a long time coming, but I’m happy to report on an important linguistic discovery: the earliest known proposal for Ms. as a title for a woman regardless of her marital status.

More linguistic numismatics
June 18, 2009
Samuel Johnson has been commemorated on a special 50p coin, as Geoff Pullum notes, but he’s not the only linguist (or linguistically inclined scholar) that has been pictured on currency.

Richard Allsopp, 1923-2009
June 5, 2009
Via the Society for Caribbean Linguistics comes news of the passing of the great linguist and lexicographer Richard Allsopp. He died on June 4 in Barbados at the age of 86.

Word aversion and attraction in the news
May 18, 2009
Language Log readers who have been following our recent posts on word aversion and word attraction will want to check out Kristi Gustafson’s article in the Albany Times Union, “Words we love, words we hate.”

Popular perceptions of lexicography: MADtv edition
Apr. 28, 2009
Last December, an episode of Comedy Central’s “Sarah Silverman Program” revolved around fanciful neologisms, culminating in a scene where the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary anoint their latest entries in a “Word Induction Ceremony.”

Forbes on neologisms, and the return of the million-word bait-and-switch
Apr. 23, 2009
Forbes.com is running a special report on neologisms — a rather peculiar topic for Forbes, I suppose, but they put together a pretty decent lineup of contributors.

Mobile morphology: UNwrong’D or just plain wrong?
Apr. 14, 2009
A new advertising campaign by the cellphone company Boost Mobile is a real head-scratcher, in large part due to its creative (possibly too creative) experimentations in English morphology.

Billy Bob, non-Gricean
Apr. 8, 2009
Billy Bob Thornton gave a bizarre interview today on CBC Radio that could serve as a case study for Paul Grice’s conversational maxims and how to violate them.

X is the Y of Z: pop music edition
Apr. 4, 2009
Continuing today’s snowclone theme… For snowclone collector Mark Peters, the phrasal template “X is the Y of Z” is the gift that just keeps on giving.

Oh no, it’s ngmoco:)
Mar. 20, 2009
Apple previewed iPhone OS 3.0 earlier this week, and they conveniently posted a video of the event on their website. I was grateful to be able to watch the video, mostly because I wanted to hear how the folks at Apple pronounce the name of the iPhone-centric game designing firm ngmoco:).

Cupertino Creep hits DC GOP
Mar. 13, 2009
When I was interviewed for Spiegel Online earlier this week about the dastardly Cupertino effect, I was asked if I thought spellchecker-enabled miscorrections would eventually vanish as spellchecking technology becomes more accurate in predicting potential errors.

Der Cupertino-Effekt
Mar. 12, 2009
Spiegel Online, Germany’s biggest news website and a sister publication of the weekly Der Spiegel, has just run an article on one of our favorite topics: the Cupertino effect, the phenomenon whereby automated spellcheckers miscorrect words and inattentive users accept those miscorrections.

The crisis-(danger)-opportunity trope, de-Sinicized
Mar. 7, 2009
It’s been a while since we’ve seen our old friend, the crisis-(danger)-opportunity trope. In its canonical form, the trope asserts that the Chinese character for “crisis” is a combination of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.”

Castro on Emanuel
Feb. 16, 2009
Fidel Castro is evidently alive and well — and writing rambling, incoherent columns on political onomastics.

Senator Lu Tian Na
Feb. 14, 2009
President Obama’s ability to exchange basic Indonesian pleasantries may render him more bi-courteous than bilingual, but New York’s new junior senator appears to have significantly more proficiency in another Asian language: Mandarin Chinese.

Putting on Ayres
Feb. 13, 2009
Janet Maslin’s New York Times review of Death by Leisure by Chris Ayres, a British journalist who reported on Hollywood for the (UK) Times, contains this puzzling passage.

Lincoln vs. Darwin in the OED
Feb. 12, 2009
On the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, let’s stop to ponder their contributions to the English lexicon.

Shamockery and shank-a-potamus
Feb. 6, 2009
Two items on the pop-cultural neologism front.

Oh boy, that’ll be the day to rave on and not fade away
Feb. 3, 2009
Today’s the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, and I’ve commemorated the event in a Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus by considering lyrics from four of his most famous songs.

The lexical richness of Bostonian one-upmanship
Feb. 1, 2009
In the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Billy Baker has an article exploring the cultural significance of the local expression salted, a popular put-down among Boston’s schoolkids.

Obama’s Indonesian pleasantries: the video
Jan. 23, 2009
Just last week I reported on a couple of accounts describing Barack Obama’s conversational skills in Indonesian, a language he learned living in Indonesia from age six to ten.

Rectifying the oath flub
Jan. 21, 2009
When Chief Justice John Roberts and Barack Obama made a hash of the presidential oath of office on Tuesday, most early commentators — including me — assumed it didn’t really matter what they said.

The last Bushism?
Jan. 21, 2009
The “Bushisms” industry, mined so thoroughly by Slate’s Jacob Weisberg for eight long years, is now a thing of the past.

Adverbial placement in the oath flub
Jan. 20, 2009
Chief Justice John Roberts’ administration of the presidential oath to Barack Obama was far from smooth.

Obama’s Indonesian redux
Jan. 15, 2009
Back in July, Bill Poser noted that “Barack Obama is reported to speak Indonesian as result of the four years, from age six to age ten, that he spent in Indonesia.”

Consider the X
Jan. 13, 2009
Over on The Loom, the blogging home of my brother Carl Zimmer, a discussion about bad science writing was sparked by a particularly noxious Esquire article.

ADS Word of the Year: Bailout
Jan. 9, 2009
Reporting live from San Francisco, where the American Dialect Society is holding its annual meeting in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America.

The return of “the boss of me”
Jan. 5, 2009
When I jotted off a Language Log post in October 2007 about searching for early occurrences of the expression “You’re not the boss of me,” little did I know that I’d eventually be supplying fodder for a New York Times article about Google Book Search.

The “million word” hoax rolls along
Jan. 3, 2009
Gullible reporters keep falling for a self-aggrandizing scam perpetrated by Paul J.J. Payack, who runs an outfit called Global Language Monitor.

The Rosa Parks of Blogs
20 Dec 2008
Snowclones, those endlessly flexible phrasal templates, have already spawned their own database, launched by Erin O’Connor in March 2007.

Blagobleepevich
15 Dec 2008
Geoff Pullum argues that the bleeping of Rod Blagojevich shields him from a full public appreciation of his foul-mouthedness.

Compromising positions
10 Dec 2008
In its article on Google’s year-end “Zeitgeist” listings of the most searched terms, BBC News reports…

Ozay, dot-nose, kangamangus
4 Dec 2008
The latest episode of Comedy Central’s “Sarah Silverman Program” (first aired Dec. 4, check your local listings for repeats) is sure to warm the hearts of neologophiles.

The “meh” wars, part 2
24 Nov 2008
Last week a truce was brokered in the great Philadelphia Alt-Weekly Battle over Meh. But fresh fighting has broken out on the webcomic front.

Atlas of True(?) Names
21 Nov 2008
As reported by Der Spiegel and picked up by the New York Times blog The Lede, two German cartographers have created The Atlas of True Names, which substitutes place names around the world with glosses based on their etymological roots.

The “meh” wars
20 Nov 2008
The announcement that the next edition of Collins English Dictionary will be including the indifferent interjection meh (having beaten out other submissions from the public) has set off a bit of a squabble between Philadelphia’s two alt-weeklies.

Fry on the pleasure of language
7 Nov 2008
After I saw a Youtube clip of British comedian and quiz show host Stephen Fry pedantically insisting that none requires a singular verb, I was sincerely disappointed that this intelligent man evinced exactly the kind of “linguistic martyrdom” that Thomas Lounsbury ridiculed a century ago.

There will be passives
7 Nov 2008
It’s time once again for our semi-regular feature, “Mr. Payack Bamboozles the Media.”

Google lawsuits settled
28 Oct 2008
Rumors had been percolating for a while now, and today it was finally announced: Google has reached a settlement with U.S. authors and publishers who had filed lawsuits challenging the massive digitization project of Google Book Search.

A brief history of hubristic drape-measuring
25 Oct 2008
In Thursday’s Washington Post, Richard Leiby digs into the background of a political cliche: “measuring (for) drapes.”

“Green behind the ears”: the untold story
15 Oct 2008
In my Word Routes column over on the Visual Thesaurus website, I recently took a look at a peculiar turn of phrase used by Barack Obama in the Oct. 7 presidential debate.

Encoding Dylan
1 Oct 2008
Ever wonder what Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” would look like overlaid with electronic text markup?

Palin’s accent
1 Oct 2008
Sarah Palin’s accent has elicited a great deal of curiosity, and now Slate has posted a well-researched analysis by the OED’s Jesse Sheidlower.

Fun and funnerer
23 Sep 2008
Today saw the release of the anxiously awaited T-Mobile G1, the first phone to use Google’s Android software. On T-Mobile’s website, the first ad for the phone was unveiled, and it’s packed with jocular comparative adjectives: smarterer, connecteder, funnerer.

Linking the linguistic Lounsburys
21 Sep 2008
In a post last February I wrote about Yale professor of language and literature Thomas R. Lounsbury (1838-1915), whose 1908 book The Standard of Usage in English bucked the priggish prescriptivism of the era.

Shattering the illusions of texting
18 Sep 2008
In my capacity as executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, I recently had the opportunity to interview David Crystal about his new book, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, a careful demolition of the myths surrounding text messaging.

All hail the Hathi Trust
16 Sep 2008
Anyone who has ever tried to use Google Book Search for serious historical research has had to grapple with its highly frustrating limitations.

Jottings on the “Jamaica” joke
13 Sep 2008
Mark Liberman’s post on a recent xkcd strip unleashed a flurry of comments about jokes that follow the template, “X-er? I hardly know ‘er!”

Adheeding, part two
1 Sep 2008
Ray Nagin has some company. Late last week, as Mayor Nagin was warning of a potential mandatory evacuation of New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Gustav, he said: “I think most people will adheed [æd’hid] to that.”

Adheeding
30 Aug 2008
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city in preparation for Hurricane Gustav. He had warned that such a move might be necessary on Thursday night, at a press conference with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.

Silent in a thousand languages
26 Aug 2008
A follow-up to yesterday’s post on Barack Obama’s half-Indonesian half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng. There’s a difference of opinion about how to pronounce her name, or at least the Ng part.

RIP, Larry Urdang, Logophile
26 Aug 2008
The New York Times carries an obituary today for lexicographer Larry Urdang, who was the managing editor of the first edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language and the founding editor of the language quarterly Verbatim.

Maya Soetoro-Ng: what’s in a name?
25 Aug 2008
Tonight is the opening night of the Democratic National Convention, and the headliner is Michelle Obama. I’m actually more interested to hear from another speaker who will be brought out to “highlight Barack’s life story,” as the Convention schedule says.

World’s fastest linguist?
6 Aug 2008
If you’re watching track and field events in the coming Olympics, keep an eye out for British runner Christine Ohuruogu, competing in the women’s 400m race (she’s currently the World Champion in the event).

Shia crushed his hand?
5 Aug 2008
Here are two snippets from news items about the actor Shia LaBeouf, who was recently involved in a car accident.

Botswaner and Louisianer
22 Jul 2008
BBC News Online’s Magazine recently asked their (British) readers to call in with their best American accents, and all I can say is that I have new respect for British actors like Hugh Laurie of House who can convincingly sound American.

Now presenting… Muphry’s Law
21 Jul 2008
Success has many fathers, the old saying has it, and the same goes for a well-turned maxim.

Temporally speaking
16 Jul 2008
On BoingBoing, someone sent in this photo of an AT&T store in downtown Manhattan: iPhone temporally out stock. “Perhaps it’ll be available last year,” Mark Frauenfelder wryly notes.

Belgium’s frictious alliance
14 Jul 2008
The prime minister of Belgium, Yves Leterme, has tendered his resignation after his government failed in its attempt to grant greater autonomy to the country’s Dutch- and French-speaking regions.

Schwarzenegger’s “when”
14 Jul 2008
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California appeared on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, and he got some press attention for his stated willingness to serve as an energy and environment czar in a hypothetical Obama administration.

The serenity meme
14 Jul 2008
As reported in the New York Times and Time Magazine, Yale law librarian and quotation-hunter extraordinaire Fred Shapiro has uncovered evidence undermining the long-held attribution of “The Serenity Prayer” to the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

Times bowdlerizes column on Times bowdlerization
12 Jul 2008
A column in the Sunday New York Times from the newspaper’s public editor Clark Hoyt is essential reading for anyone concerned with modern journalistic practices of taboo avoidance.

Of pasties and pastries
9 Jul 2008
On his “Freakonomics” blog on the New York Times website, Stephen J. Dubner has just learned the perils of the Bierce/Hartman/McKean/Skitt Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation (corrections of linguistic error are themselves prone to error).

U.S. sprinter undergoes search-and-replace
30 Jun 2008
As has already been the subject of much blogospheric mirth, news about sprinter Tyson Gay’s record time in the U.S. Olympic track and field trials was reported in peculiar fashion by the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site.

“Skadoosh” and the case of the schwa
29 Jun 2008
In today’s Boston Globe it’s my honor to pinch-hit for a vacationing Jan Freeman, who writes a fantastic weekly column called “The Word.”

Facebook phases out singular “they”
27 Jun 2008
As Eric Bakovic described here last year, Facebook uses they as a singular pronoun when the gender of the user is not known, leading to news feed items like: “Pat Jones added Prince to their favorite music.”

High flatulent language
4 Jun 2008
Christopher A. Craig sends along a gem of a Cupertino (our term for a spellchecker-induced miscorrection), from today’s “Washington Wire” blog on the online Wall Street Journal.

Cupertino yearbook tragedy!
2 Jun 2008
Will nothing stop the wanton destruction of the Cupertino Effect? The latest victims of exuberant spellchecking are high school students in Middletown, Pennsylvania.

“Chad” back in the news
30 May 2008
Most of us haven’t thought much about the word chad since the 2000 presidential recount in Florida.

Superdelegates, round two
26 May 2008
Back on April 15, Robert Beard posted an entry on “Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog” about the word superdelegate, writing that “the US press is pushing a new word into our collective vocabulary in an apparent attempt to tilt the US elections in the direction it prefers.”

Presidential pronoun watch
20 May 2008
Early last week, Hillary Clinton had a bit of pronoun trouble, as Daffy Duck would say.

Operatic IPA and the Visual Thesaurus
14 May 2008
In my new capacity as executive producer for the Visual Thesaurus (a job title Mark Liberman had some fun with), I’m responsible for editing the content of the website’s online magazine and also for creating some of it.

Latest stock market casualty: consumer dictionary companies?
10 May 2008
A recent Associated Press wire story about the declining stock market contained an optimistic note from Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors.

“Ghoti” before Shaw
23 Apr 2008
One of the sturdiest linguistic canards is that George Bernard Shaw facetiously proposed spelling fish as ghoti, with gh pronounced as in laugh, o as in women, and ti as in nation.

“Superdelegates”: a not-so-novel concoction
19 Apr 2008
Back in January 2004 Mark Liberman engaged with Dr. Robert Beard, then doing business as “Dr. Language” on yourDictionary.com, on the politics of pronunciation.

Horribles and terribles
13 Apr 2008
Recently the news has been full of horrible and terrible things — or, to be more precise, horribles and terribles.

Batman bin Suparman: behind the name
8 Apr 2008
A scanned image of a Singaporean identity card has been making the rounds online, recently turning up on the widely read techie blog Gizmodo.

An infuriating Cupertino
4 Apr 2008
Audrey Devine-Eller writes in with the latest entry for the Cupertino files. This spellchecker-induced gem is from the Student Personnel Services page on South Brunswick (NJ) High School’s website.

Saying it wrong on porpoise
3 Apr 2008
Grant Barrett is now doing a weekly language column for the Malaysia Star, and this week he talks about saying things the wrong way on purpose — intentional errors like the Internets and coinkydink.

Ernie Banks gets apostrophized
2 Apr 2008
When the Chicago Cubs unveiled a statue of beloved player Ernie Banks outside Wrigley Field earlier this week, there were murmurs of horror among the enemies of apostrophe abuse.

Pennsylvania blather?
1 Apr 2008
With the Democratic presidential primary in Pennsylvania still three weeks away, political reporters have a lot of column inches to fill and are no doubt looking for creative ways to combat the campaign trail’s proverbial fear and loathing.

A grammatical Cupertino?
21 Feb 2008
On the American Dialect Society mailing list, Ron Butters notes an unusual sentence appearing in today’s Orlando Sentinel.

Searching for (un)clarity in the OED
11 Feb 2008
Geoff Pullum recently brought us up to speed on the case of Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, who has been credited by the British media with the idea that the adoption of shari’a law in Britain “seems unavoidable.”

Romney can’t compete with Senator Moccasin
7 Feb 2008
Today’s big political news story was Mitt Romney’s announcement that he was suspending his presidential campaign. When a major event like this occurs, everyone’s anxious to get the news out quickly, so it’s tailormade for… the Cupertino effect!

Lounsbury on linguistic martyrdom and the transience of slang
7 Feb 2008
My latest column on OUPblog takes a lead-a-horse-to-water approach to two usage points that are among the favorite bugaboos of peevologists.

Incorrections in the newsroom: Cupertino and beyond
1 Feb 2008
Many of the journalistic “incorrections” we’ve noted here recently, from the “Muttonhead Quail Movement” to “GOP cell phones,” can be blamed on the inattentive use of spell-checkers, otherwise known as the Cupertino effect.

Nanoblahblah in The New Scientist
30 Jan 2008
The latest edition of The New Scientist includes an article by Jim Giles entitled “Word nerds capture fleeting online English.”

More on misplaced spellings
29 Jan 2008
I’m just a humble collector of Cupertino curiosities, but Thierry Fontenelle of the Microsoft Natural Language Group is deep in the orthographic trenches, tinkering with the algorithms used by the Microsoft Office spellchecker so that users get the spelling suggestions they deserve.

Cupertino, Part Deux: I read it on misplace
25 Jan 2008
Continuing the Cupertino theme… Michael Covarrubias and Mike Pope both noted a fine example of spellchecker miscorrection from the Associated Press last week.

Depending on the kindness of spellcheckers
25 Jan 2008
From the Cupertino mailbag comes a note from Charles Belov, who writes in with a spellchecker-induced slipup that made its way into a work of literary criticism from a major American publisher.

Fighting against (fighting against) women
11 Jan 2008
Hot on the heels of last month’s “GOP cell phones,” here’s another shocking Associated Press headline hosted by Google News.

ADS Word of the Year: Subprime
4 Jan 2008
Greetings from Chicago, where the American Dialect Society has just held its annual Word of the Year voting. And the winner for 2007 is… subprime, an adjective much in the news this past year to describe risky loans to unqualified borrowers.

Catherine Tate to bovver America
28 Dec 2007
The American Dialect Society’s vote for Word of the Year is fast approaching, bringing an end to the WOTY season here in the States. In the UK, a Word of the Year is selected annually by Susie Dent, word expert on the popular game show Countdown and author of The Language Report.

Christmas and “politically correct(ed)ness”
25 Dec 2007
As in past years, this holiday season has featured numerous gripes about the “politically correct” avoidance of the word Christmas.

More on the early days of “eggnog”
24 Dec 2007
Just in time for the holiday season, Heidi Harley wrote here on the discovery of an early citation for eggnog, apparently antedating the first OED cite of 1825 by about fifty years.

Couric on the primaries: too close to call, tight as a tick
20 Dec 2007
As the early rounds of presidential primaries and caucuses approach, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric has been emphasizing just how close the races are.

Languagehat revealed!
17 Dec 2007
After five and a half years of prolific (yet always thoughtful) linguablogging, our esteemed colleague Languagehat has finally divulged his “real-life” identity to the world in a recent post.

Contrition, conditionally speaking
16 Dec 2007
After his name turned up in the Mitchell Report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, New York Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte issued the sort of non-apology apology we’ve come to expect from baseball stars, from Pete Rose to Ozzie Guillen.

Trope-watch, Oslo edition
10 Dec 2007
With dreary inevitability, Al Gore dusted off his favorite language-related trope for his speech accepting the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

GOP cell phones?
4 Dec 2007
Here’s a rather startling headline for a recent Associated Press article, as hosted by Google News:.

Suggestive blending with Satchel and Bucky
2 Dec 2007
This past week in the comic strip “Get Fuzzy,” Satchel Pooch and Bucky Katt explored the pleasures and perils of neologization through blending, and they managed to get banned by the Chicago Tribune (and perhaps other newspapers) for their efforts.

Might would have
19 Nov 2007
You don’t get to hear a finely turned double modal from a major presidential candidate very often these days.

Exhausted grammar
19 Nov 2007
“Pardon My Planet,” (Nov. 14): Brett Reynolds posted this on his English, Jack blog, with a note: “I wonder if Shatner ever felt that he was hyphenating his words. Likely this is more of a cartoonist’s thing.”

Heynabonics
17 Nov 2007
One of the latest YouTube sensations is, surprisingly enough, a metalinguistic exploration of the speech patterns of northeastern Pennsylvania.

Lolcavore!
14 Nov 2007
Faithful reader Andrew Glines has created what might be the first-ever Language Log mashup.

Locavore vs. localvore: the coiner speaks
13 Nov 2007
As I announced yesterday, locavore (‘one who endeavors to eat only locally produced foods’) has been selected as the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year.

Great moments in antedating, part 2: all nine yards of goodies
12 Nov 2007
Back in June I reported on a newly discovered citation for the expression “the whole nine yards” from April 1964, two years earlier than what had previously been the first known appearance of the phrase.

Locavore or localvore?
12 Nov 2007
One of the more enjoyable duties I have as an editor at Oxford University Press is working with OUP’s lexicographers to select the Word of the Year.

The Muttonhead Quail Movement
1 Nov 2007
Today on OUPblog I delve into a topic I’ve discussed on several occasions on Language Log (here, here, here, and here): the modern phenomenon of spellchecker-induced slipups, a.k.a. “the Cupertino effect.”

Taboo avoidance in translation: kros words
29 Oct 2007
Deborah Cameron’s new book The Myth of Mars and Venus continues to draw press attention in Britain, the latest coming from a column by Damian Whitworth in the Life & Style section of the Times.

Statured pitchers, statured scientists
29 Oct 2007
Continuing the baseball theme… Super-agent Scott Boras announced last night that Alex Rodriguez would opt out of his contract with the New York Yankees and declare free agency.

It’s a made-up word used to trick students
24 Oct 2007
Geoff Pullum warned us a few years back about “the coming death of whom,” and last week’s episode of The Office provides ample evidence that whomever is similarly on its last legs.

Adding insult to injury: the power of “a”
22 Oct 2007
Sunday’s New York Daily News sports section reveals a bizarre case of lawyers making mincemeat of conversational implicature.

Pinker’s almer mater
2 Oct 2007
The September 22 issue of The Guardian featured a long profile of Steven Pinker by Oliver Burkeman. It’s worth reading, especially if you want to know about some of the extreme reactions that Pinker’s work in linguistics and evolutionary psychology has provoked.

Have another think
28 Sep 2007
Mark wonders why the OED claims “have another thing coming” is derived from “have another think coming,” and yet provides a first citation of the former from 1919 and of the latter only from 1937.

Mukasey weighs in on clear writing and light beer
24 Sep 2007
Newspapers have been running profiles of Judge Michael B. Mukasey, President Bush’s nominee to succeed Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, and he is revealed to have a number of surprising qualities, at least compared to some of Bush’s past choices for Cabinet positions.

The prehistory of emoticons
20 Sep 2007
There’s been a fair amount of press coverage this week for the 25th anniversary of a momentous event in the history of online communication.

Snowclone collectors, call your offices
16 Sep 2007
Eagle-eyed reader Josh Kamensky points out a phrasal formula that has popped up in the headings of three separate Language Log posts.

Reuters says guilty of elliptical headlines
27 Aug 2007
When the news hit the wires last Friday that Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick was pleading guilty to charges involving illegal dogfighting, the Reuters headline read: NFL’s Vick says guilty in dogfighting case.

The allure of eggcorns
24 Aug 2007
It came up a few days ago on the American Dialect Society mailing list, but I had to see it to believe it. In the September issue of the women’s magazine Allure (with Britney Spears on the cover) eggcorns and other language errors share the same page with a picture of Jessica Simpson and Eva Longoria.

Define this, you nitwits
6 Aug 2007
Snopes, the foremost online repository of urban legends, reports that the following email is making the rounds.

Um…
5 Aug 2007
In today’s Boston Globe, Michael Erard pinch-hits for “The Word” columnist Jan Freeman and gives a preview of his new book, Um… Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean.

The ecology of peevology
26 Jul 2007
Over on OUPblog I write today about the use of the word carbon to generate new eco-buzzwords like carbon-neutral and carbon footprint.

Eggcorns on OUPblog
12 Jul 2007
A couple of weeks ago Mark Liberman was kind enough to announce my new blogging venture on OUPblog, the official blog of Oxford University Press.

The right to do process
4 Jul 2007
This Fourth of July, I’ve been thinking about those “unalienable Rights” that the signers of the Declaration of Independence felt were so self-evident.

BBC approves “shite” and “gobshite” (in moderation)
22 Jun 2007
In case you were wondering, it’s apparently okay to call someone a shite, a gobshite, or even a bogshite on the airwaves of Northern Ireland.

Great moments in antedating
20 Jun 2007
In the search for the early history of common words and phrases, sometimes a discovery that pushes back the documentary record just a few years can be quite momentous indeed.

Calling all Chicagoland neologizers
13 Jun 2007
I’m off to the sixteenth biennial conference of the Dictionary Society of North America, which gets underway tomorrow on the campus of the University of Chicago.

Contrastive focus reduplication in the courtroom
11 Jun 2007
So far today we’ve had a post about contrastive focus reduplication and another one relating to linguistic evidence in jury trials. In a bit of Language Log synchronicity, today’s news contains a wire story that combines these two themes.

English declared “national language” (again)
7 Jun 2007
Last night the Senate voted to approve Sen. James Inhofe’s amendment to the immigration reform bill declaring English the “national language.”

Hablador de la Casa
4 Jun 2007
There’s a long piece by David Montgomery in Sunday’s Washington Post about the pragmatic choice made by presidential candidates and other politicians to communicate with voters in Spanish, even among those who strongly support the primacy of English.

Punctuation, now with heightened indifference!
23 May 2007
Proposals to supplement the arsenal of English punctuation have historically been about as successful as proposals for epicene pronouns — which is to say, not successful at all, despite the enthusiasm of the proposers.

Lol-lexicography
18 May 2007
In his appeal for linguist macros, Mark Liberman writes…

T(w)angy eggcorns from Globe readers
13 May 2007
Last month Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe issued an appeal for readers to send in their favorite eggcorns, “those verbal misunderstandings that produce erroneous yet logical new terms,” as Freeman describes them.

Never tell the Queen you’re pleased to meet her
18 Apr 2007
Want your daughter to marry an heir to the British throne? Make sure you never utter the word “toilet” or “pardon?” and for heaven’s sake don’t say “Pleased to meet you” to the Queen.

Third time’s a charm
3 Apr 2007
And now the latest chapter in the saga of President Bush’s “Democrat(ic)” problem.

Gingrich’s “ghetto” talk
2 Apr 2007
A Mar. 31 AP article about a speech by Newt Gingrich before the the National Federation of Republican Women has circulated widely over the past few days.

The EU and “Islamic terrorism”: other voices
2 Apr 2007
Bill Poser’s post earlier today, “Political Correctness, Linguistic Incorrectness,” has sparked some trenchant critiques elsewhere in the linguablogosphere.

The bubbled-in president
31 Mar 2007
Matthew Dowd, President Bush’s chief strategist during the 2004 campaign, has some not-so-nice things to say about his former boss in today’s New York Times.

Crisis = danger + opportunity: The plot thickens
27 Mar 2007
It’s a favorite rhetorical device of public figures across the political spectrum, from Al Gore to Condoleezza Rice: the Chinese word for “crisis” (we are told again and again) consists of the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.”

Macaronic Maraka
26 Mar 2007
The funniest moments on “Saturday Night Live” these days are very often the satirical cartoons featured on Robert Smigel’s “TV Funhouse,” and last Saturday’s episode was no exception.

Stop him before he tropes again
22 Mar 2007
Al Gore hauled out one of his favorite factoids while testifying about global warming before two different congressional committees yesterday.

Beware of sleeping idioms
14 Mar 2007
As part of its “offbeat” news offerings, the Associated Press reports on a cigarette ad campaign in Indonesia that has angered the national police force, so much so that the manufacturer PT Djarum now faces possible legal action.

The perils of comic-strip lead time
24 Feb 2007
According to the “Doonesbury” FAQ, Garry Trudeau has to deliver his weekday strips ten days ahead of time, while the Sunday strip must be submitted a whopping six weeks ahead of time.

“Babel” babble
24 Feb 2007
There’s a pre-Oscars article from the Associated Press making the rounds, all about how to pronounce the name of one of the Best Picture contenders, Babel.

Diapers, diapers, and more diapers
21 Feb 2007
My post last week about the word diapers generated far more heated discussion than I would have guessed. (Seems like anyone who’s ever had to change diapers has an opinion about them.)

Rankled by “ankle”
17 Feb 2007
On Opinion L.A, the daily blog of the Los Angeles Times Opinion Section, Matt Welch sounds seriously peeved by a bit of Hollywood-speak.

Awwa, meh, feh, heh
16 Feb 2007
Ben Yagoda has a terrific article in Slate today entitled “Pardon the Interjection.”

Astronaut drives 900 miles wearing…
15 Feb 2007
When NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak was arrested on Feb. 5 and charged with the attempted murder of her romantic rival, we were treated to nonstop media coverage of the bizarre story.

Old habits die hard
14 Feb 2007
You may recall that just a couple of weeks ago President Bush was congratulating the “Democrat majority” in his State of the Union address — deviating from the text on the teleprompter, which had “Democratic majority.”

“Barack” mailbag
14 Feb 2007
My post about the fake controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s first name has brought in some thought-provoking email.

A zero tolerance approach to parody
13 Feb 2007
Jan Freeman takes note of a recent article in The Independent about the latest bee in Lynne Truss’s bonnet: parodies of her best-selling book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.

Whatever happened to the millionth word?
13 Feb 2007
The commemoration of Language Log’s ten millionth page view reminds me of another decimalized milestone that was supposed to be forthcoming.

The barrage against “Barack”
12 Feb 2007
Sen. Barack Obama has already faced tiresome media scrutiny about his last name (“Obama” evokes Osama!) and his middle name (“Hussein” evokes Saddam!), so it was only a matter of time before his first name got the once-over.

Parents will never be cool
4 Feb 2007
The parent-child interaction observed by Mark Liberman in the comic strip “Stone Soup” struck me as awfully familiar.

Snowclone atonement
2 Feb 2007
Sometimes it feels as if our perpetual complaints about the Eskimo snow-word myth — and its attendant snowclones — are nothing more than empty howls echoing across the tundra.

Snow-word progress: glacial at best
29 Jan 2007
Geoff Pullum did his best to sound optimistic a few weeks ago when a reader sent in a reasonably well-informed treatment of the “Eskimo snow words” myth from the Holland Herald, the in-flight magazine of KLM Airlines.

Celeb-u-rama
19 Jan 2007
Time Magazine recently revamped its online presence, relaunching Time.com with a host of new features. One of them is a daily news aggregator summarizing top stories from newspapers and blogs.

A Guardian editor’s bitterest embarrassment
15 Jan 2007
Back in November, I noted a Guardian column by reader’s editor Ian Mayes, in which Mayes unquestioningly accepted a reader’s absurd assertion that the “correct” superlative form of bitter is most bitter and never bitterest.

Is it down cigar head can pull out necessary?
10 Jan 2007
The Language Log bat signal can be sent out from anywhere… even from an automobile work-light in northern Ghana.

Pluto got plutoed, but it still won WOTY
5 Jan 2007
Breaking news from Anaheim, where the American Dialect Society is holding its annual meeting: the winner of the 2006 Word of the Year vote is (drum roll, please)… plutoed.

On the trail of “the new black” (and “the navy blue”)
28 Dec 2006
In our occasional roundups of those phrasal formulae we call snowclones, one of the most fertile templates has been “X is the new Y.”

Worrisome details
28 Dec 2006
The BBC may be continuing to peddle its nonsense about cow dialects, but at least one comic strip character has rightly decided not to worry about this factitious factoid.

Surging vocabulary
27 Dec 2006
Geoff Nunberg is right to point out the semantic novelty of surge in the sense of “a prolonged deployment of additional troops in Iraq,” as the Bush administration and others have used the term in recent weeks.

The Verbing Man
27 Dec 2006
Mark Liberman’s recent triptych on denominal verbs reminds me of a bit of light verse I discovered while doing research in the Proquest Historical Newspapers archive — proof positive that the rampant verbing of nouns was already ripe for satirization 120 years ago.

ADS WOTY: Make your nominations
24 Dec 2006
The American Dialect Society’s annual “Word of the Year” selection is rapidly approaching.

Truthiness wins another one
20 Dec 2006
As boldly predicted here two weeks ago, the Stephen Colbert-ism truthiness followed up its resounding win as Merriam-Webster’s 2006 Word of the Year with a similar victory in the Dictionary.com competition.

Nugetre
15 Dec 2006
One small footnote to Geoff Pullum’s fond remembrance of Ahmet Ertegun.

One way to get a word in the dictionary
13 Dec 2006
On his Comedy Central show last night (video here), Stephen Colbert triumphantly announced that “truthiness” had been selected by Merriam-Webster as their 2006 Word of the Year.

Spanish on the Senate floor: the great non-debate
10 Dec 2006
A few days I posted about the new “Stop Martinez” website, set up by the lobbying group English First to oppose President Bush’s choice of Sen. Mel Martinez as the next chairman of the Republican National Committee

Another year of truthiness
8 Dec 2006
Merriam-Webster has announced its Word of the Year, and it’s our old friend truthiness. We’ve been tracking the word’s progress ever since Stephen Colbert introduced it on the first episode of his Comedy Central show back in October.

Apocalypto: Raising linguistic hackles
7 Dec 2006
After months and months of anticipation, Mel Gibson’s Mayan epic Apocalypto is finally upon us.

“Mel Martinez is Spanish for Harriet Miers”
7 Dec 2006
Andrew Leonard at Salon reports that the linguistic nationalists at English First are in an uproar over President Bush’s selection of Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) to take over the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee.

Singular “their”: public health edition
2 Dec 2006
Yesterday, as the poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko began to broaden into a wider radiation scare, Great Britain’s Health Protection Agency released the following statement.

Yet another epicene pronoun: Hu are we kidding?
28 Nov 2006
On his excellent “Web of Language” site, Dennis Baron writes of the latest effort to introduce a non-gender-specific (or “epicene”) singular third-person pronoun into English.

Cyber Monday vs. eDay
26 Nov 2006
As countless media reports are informing us, tomorrow is “Cyber Monday,” the day that supposedly kicks off the online holiday shopping season.

Final-vowel thankfulness
22 Nov 2006
On the feminist blog Echidne of the Snakes (via Wonkette), a guest-blogger using the handle “olvlzl” suggests an ethnopoliticolinguistic “reason to be thankful” this Thanksgiving.

Bitterest battles in the war on error
19 Nov 2006
A peculiar feature of linguistic prescriptivism is that the most passionate assertions of rightness and wrongness often occur in precisely those areas of the language where there is the most ambivalence among native speakers.

Madonna in Malawi: distinguished white lady?
3 Nov 2006
It’s a fair bet that most Americans were unaware of the existence of the poverty-stricken African nation of Malawi before Madonna decided to fund an orphanage there and adopt a Malawian child.

Yale and the persuasive words: the final nail in the coffin
13 Oct 2006
Just in case anyone is still holding on to the notion that Yale researchers really did uncover the twelve most persuasive words in English, let’s hear from an actual Yale researcher.

Persuasive words: the early years
11 Oct 2006
The list of the most persuasive (or powerful) words in the English language — variously attributed to researchers at University of California, Yale University, and Duke University — is actually a musty bit of lexical lore long predating the Internet.

Chomsky killed by interpreter?
9 Oct 2006
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly on September 20, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez spoke approvingly of Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, resulting in a massive uptick in sales for the book.

Unkempt secrets
6 Oct 2006
In the Oct. 5 edition of “Post Politics Hour,” the Washington Post’s online chat with the newspaper’s political reporters, this week’s host Peter Baker fielded the following reader comment.

Malaysia cracks down on “salad language”
5 Oct 2006
The Associated Press reports that Malaysia’s Minister of Culture, Arts and Heritage, Rais Yatim, has announced a crackdown on the misuse of the national language of Malay.

Eggcorns in the Grauniad
5 Oct 2006
We’re happy to report that the term eggcorn — a Language-Loggian coinage to describe orthographic or phonological reshapings that seem to make semantic sense — continues to worm its way into the public consciousness, thanks to some enlightened souls in the media.

The Cupertino effect strikes again
2 Oct 2006
On the American Dialect Society mailing list, Joel Berson recently noted this perplexing item from the police log of the Arlington (Mass.) Advocate (Sept. 28, 2006).

Spreading the faith by the sword, and vice versa
15 Sep 2006
Pope Benedict XVI has incited a firestorm of criticism in the Muslim world by relying on an obscure medieval polemic to illustrate a point about religion and violence.

Taxonation without representation
14 Sep 2006
Arriving a bit late to the Pluto pity party is Bill Amend’s nerdy comic strip “FoxTrot” (Sept. 14).

R.I.P. King Tupou IV, Tongan language reformer
10 Sep 2006
Today’s New York Times carries an obituary for the King of Tonga, Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV, who died at the age of 88 after serving as his nation’s powerful leader (and heir to the last remaining Polynesian monarchy) for 41 years.

The shrimp did what to the cabbage?
10 Sep 2006
Welcome, BoingBoing readers. A few Language Log posts have been linked in a recent BoingBoing discussion about the mysterious appearance of the word fuck in Chinese menus seeking a translation-equivalent for GAN ‘dry’ (干).

The surreptitious history of -licious
4 Sep 2006
The year 1992, as Arnold Zwicky observes, was a high-water mark for the jocular suffix -(V)licious.

Arabic-ophobia
31 Aug 2006
An addendum to Bill Poser’s post about the fellow who couldn’t fly out of JFK because he was wearing a T-shirt with an Arabic slogan.

Silly-season linguifying?
26 Aug 2006
Though the journalistic silly season may give rise to even-worse-than-average science reporting, at least there are some redeeming qualities.

Make Very Excellent Mnemonics: Just Start Using Noggin!
25 Aug 2006
As Interplanetary Linguistics Week continues here at Language Log, let’s return to Geoff Pullum’s post about planet mnemonics back on Sunday, when it appeared that the International Astronomical Union might add three new planets to the current lineup.

New planetary definition a “linguistic catastrophe”!
25 Aug 2006
Owen Gingerich, chairman of the International Astronomical Union’s Planet Definition Committee, is quite distressed about the resolution passed by the IAU’s General Assembly in Prague yesterday.

Obscenicons in the workplace
24 Aug 2006
Here’s the latest example of cartoon meta-commentary on cursing characters (let’s call ’em obscenicons).

Mutating netlore, from “fuck” to “snakes on a plane”
24 Aug 2006
That Indian spiritual figure Osho may have known how to work a crowd, but his grammatically questionable lecture on the utility of the word fuck is nothing more than a bit of musty netlore.

Quantifier domain restriction and gel-filled bras
20 Aug 2006
As Mark Liberman noted, security expert Bruce Schneier had some fun with this line from the Transportation Security Administration’s byzantine list of prohibited carry-on items.

How to baffle Welsh cyclists
18 Aug 2006
By law, road signs in Wales must be printed in both English and Welsh. But let’s hope the highway authorities generally do a better job with creating bilingual signs than they did with this unfortunate example between Penarth and Cardiff.

Makaku, macaco, macaque, macaca…
15 Aug 2006
By now everyone’s no doubt heard about Virginia Senator George Allen’s unfortunate appellation for S.R. Sidarth, a 20-year-old of Indian descent working for Allen’s Democratic opponent James Webb.

Overnegation as obfuscation
9 Aug 2006
We’ve observed many times (most recently here, here, and here — see also the list of links here) that multiple-negation constructions often seem to overload the parsing circuits of our poor brains.

Boston’s irreconcilable council(l)ors
7 Aug 2006
Boston’s City Council is hopelessly deadlocked over a grave matter: Should council(l)or be spelled with one L or two?

It’s hard not to read this and not do a double-take
31 Jul 2006
Here’s the latest dispatch on the overnegation front… Over on Slate, Christopher Hitchens takes on Mel Gibson’s “Jew-hatred,” observing that Gibson has never disowned his father’s anti-Semitic comments.

Cracking down on the Hezbollians
19 Jul 2006
When President Bush was overheard telling Tony Blair, “What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it’s over,” everyone latched on to Bush’s use of a naughty, naughty word.

Taking shit from the President
18 Jul 2006
Repercussions from the sh-t heard round the world continue to be felt. Unlike most other media sources, the New York Times and the Washington Post decided not to censor President Bush’s pithy solution for peace in the Middle East.

Presidential expletive watch
17 Jul 2006
You’d think President Bush might have learned his lesson back in 2000, when a live microphone picked up his rude comment to Dick Cheney, calling New York Times reporter Adam Clymer a “major-league asshole.”

More “self” talk, from country crooners to city slickers
15 Jul 2006
Back in November I wondered in two posts about the origins of the jocular expression of self-address, “So I said to myself, ‘Self…'”

Air quotes and non-apologies
4 Jul 2006
In his discussion of Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen’s use of the word fag to describe a despised reporter, Arnold Zwicky missed an interesting aspect of Guillen’s subsequent defense.

Everybody’s going meta
23 Jun 2006
“Beetle Bailey” isn’t the only comic strip featuring meta-commentary on cursing characters these days. Here’s a “Mother Goose & Grimm” strip that ran on May 6th.

Time after time after time…
21 Jun 2006
The Oxford English Corpus, a lexicographical research project on 21st-century English, has generated a surprising amount of copy for news organizations lately.

A stricter prescriptivism
20 Jun 2006
Here’s a piece of mail we recently received at Language Log Plaza, from a correspondent who shall remain nameless so as not to inflame the ire of his already ireful boss.

Feeling hitterish with Diz and the Babe
18 Jun 2006
During the broadcast of today’s game between the New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals on the YES network, announcer Michael Kay had this to say about Alfonso Soriano (once a Yankee, now a National).

Extorting Barry
10 Jun 2006
If you’ve been following the controversy over Barry Bonds’ alleged steroid use, you may have heard of Kimberly Bell, the ballplayer’s ex-girlfriend.

Go and synergize no more
9 Jun 2006
If, as Geoff Pullum reminds us, “people who are clueless about English grammar shouldn’t be trying to humiliate others over grammar,” then by the same token people who don’t know how to use a dictionary shouldn’t try to appeal to lexicographical authority to advance an argument.

Meh-ness to society
8 Jun 2006
In today’s Star-Ledger (a daily newspaper from northern New Jersey), television critic Alan Sepinwall responds to readers’ comments about the HBO series “The Sopranos.”

“Redux” in flux
7 Jun 2006
News flash from the Associated Press… The Senate has rejected a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. But the more momentous news from Language Log’s perspective comes in this sentence from the AP report: The House plans a redux next month, said Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

French in Maine: Louis XIV lives?
4 Jun 2006
After decades of stigmatization, French language use is experiencing a revival in the state of Maine, according to the New York Times.

How do you spell “xenophobia”?
2 Jun 2006
Blogospheric reactions to last night’s results from the Scripps National Spelling Bee, in which Catharine Close of Spring Lakes, NJ vanquished Finola Hackett of Tofield, Alberta, have tended toward the facetiously jingoistic.

“Big” in Japan (and Bali)
2 Jun 2006
Matt of No-sword, an excellent blog on all matters Japanological, recently brought up an interesting case of lexical borrowing across multiple languages.

Tutoyer, koine, tmesis, Ursprache
2 Jun 2006
Sure, most Language Log readers know those words (or should), but what about seventh and eighth graders?

Tensions between a singular and plural nouns
29 May 2006
New York Times cultural critic Edward Rothstein has a provocative column about the Senate vote to declare English the “national language,” contrasting the legislation with the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages.

I have stress! You have stress! Not resolved!
25 May 2006
The latest “viral video” to become a global sensation via the Youtube website is a six-minute clip from Hong Kong called “Bus Uncle” (or “Uncle Bus,” as Wikipedia currently renders it).

Attorney General caught in linguistic snare!
20 May 2006
Confusion reigned on Friday over the Senate vote on separate amendments to the immigration reform bill declaring English the “national language” on the one hand and the “common and unifying language” on the other.

Hutchisonian science
19 May 2006
As Mark Liberman notes in an update to his post, “Request for action from the AAA,” Inside Higher Ed now reports that the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation has rebuffed Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s proposal to cut (or at least drastically deprioritize) social science funding in the NSF budget.

English: official, national, common, unifying, or other?
19 May 2006
Has the United States Senate really voted for “official English,” as Bill Poser writes?

Pulling (to) within: the paper trail
15 May 2006
Last week I wrote about the peculiar sports expression “pull (to) within N” meaning ‘narrow a differential of points, runs, etc. to exactly N’.

Mock Spanish or Mock Mock Spanish?
12 May 2006
When the news broke that Cingular Wireless had revoked a cell-phone ringtone featuring Mock Spanish in a poorly conceived joke about border-crossing, I rattled off a post that suspected “racist intent” at work behind the ringtone.

Pulling within
10 May 2006
Here’s an easy bet. Tune in to an upcoming NBA playoff game — say, tonight’s matchup between the New Jersey Nets and the Miami Heat — and wait for one team to fall behind by a significant margin.

Mock Spanish in the cellular age
10 May 2006
In a 1995 paper, the linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill argued that the register of “Mock Spanish” serves as “a site for the indexical reproduction of racism in American English.”

A racy WTF coordination
10 May 2006
Joe Gordon spotted a headline that is both off-color (erotically so) and off-kilter (grammatically so) on Drew Curtis’ Fark.com, a popular website where users comment on a variety of weird and wacky news articles.

Cartoon roundup, “Nuestro Himno” edition
6 May 2006
Every once in a while a linguistic issue dominates the national discourse: think of the “Ebonics” dispute of 1996, or the debate over California’s initiative to curtail bilingual education in 1998.

Whorf in a bottle
5 May 2006
Courtesy of Grant Barrett (who in turn credits fellow lexicographer Erin McKean), here’s a naively Whorfian advertisement spotted along Fifth Avenue in New York.

Busting he(a)ds at the Express-News
3 May 2006
We’ve complained in the past about inane punning headlines in newspapers and magazines, but now one editor is doing something about it.

Bush saved by his own bi-ignorance?
3 May 2006
The “Nuestro Himno” imbroglio continued today, with the Washington Post reporting on a tidbit that would seem to undercut President Bush’s stated opposition to “The Star-Spangled Banner” being sung in a Spanish translation.

Oxford English Corpus: infested with eggcorns!
2 May 2006
The billion-word Oxford English Corpus continues to make news, though thankfully no longer under the farcical headline, “English Language Hits 1 Billion Words.”

Punctuation tip’s
30 Apr 2006
Here’s yet another complaint of apostrophe abuse in comic-strip form, this time from Steve Breen’s Grand Avenue.

Ma Ferguson, the apocryphal know-nothing
29 Apr 2006
Eric Bakovic recently invoked the famous saying attributed to Texas Governor Miriam Amanda “Ma” Ferguson: “If the King’s English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for the children of Texas!”

The multilingual anthem
29 Apr 2006
In the Washington Post’s reporting on the “Nuestro Himno” controversy, David Montgomery wrote: At least 389 versions have been recorded, according to Allmusic.com, a quick reference used by musicologists to get a sense of what’s on the market.

A million words here, a billion words there…
26 Apr 2006
It looks like 2006 is going to be a banner year for misinformed reporting on the English language.

Full tilde
25 Apr 2006
Jim Gordon recently complained (in an update to a post on pronouncing sauna) about how the New York Times crossword puzzle elides diacritical marks from foreignisms even when this results in a different word in the relevant language.

Adventures in celebrity onomastics
22 Apr 2006
When Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes announced the birth of their daughter on Tuesday, celebrity-watchers were eager to find out what to call TomKat’s offspring (besides TomKitten, of course).

Ali G in the land of colorless green ideas
21 Apr 2006
If you’ve had enough of linguists talking about Ali G (the fake purveyor of Jafaican), why not watch Ali G talking about linguistics?

Heated words about “sauna”
20 Apr 2006
In the Apr. 14 installment of Jef Mallett’s comic strip “Frazz,” the title character (an enlightened school janitor) argues over the proper pronunciation of the word sauna with Caulfield (a young student at the school).

MLA Language Map enters new territory
19 Apr 2006
Back in June 2004, the MLA website rolled out an interactive language map of the United States, displaying the number of speakers per county or zip code for 37 languages, based on 2000 census data.

My name is Hare and I know nothing
14 Apr 2006
A happy Pesach, Paschal Triduum and Easter for all who celebrate. Here’s an Easter-related translational oddity just in time for Holy Week.

A brief history of “spaz”
14 Apr 2006
Tiger Woods landed in hot water after he made this comment in a post-round interview with CBS at the Masters Tournament.

Pronominal perplexity at the AP
13 Apr 2006
Looks like the Associated Press today had a little bit of what Daffy Duck memorably called “pronoun trouble.”

Unfolding Infogami
11 Apr 2006
A few months ago Mike Pope of Evolving English II brought to our attention an employment website called Jobdango, which grafted the last two syllables of fandango onto job to create its domain name.

A fishapod called Tiktaalik
10 Apr 2006
The big news these days in evolutionary biology is the discovery of Tiktaalik roseae, a fossil fish dating back to the Late Devonian era, some 375 million years ago.

WTF coordination in the bullpen
7 Apr 2006
Here’s another gem from Ball Four by Jim Bouton, who clearly has a keen ear for ballplayer-talk.

The discreet charm of French orthography
7 Apr 2006
Francophones can be just as peevish about spelling, grammar, and usage as Anglophones, but at least they can have fun with their linguistic foibles rather than descending into murderous rage.

Linguists ‘have different brains’
7 Apr 2006
That’s the headline for a recent BBC report from the frontiers of neuroscience.

How innovative is that!
5 Apr 2006
One more for the baseball files… The game of baseball has provided many obvious contributions to the English lexicon, particularly via metaphorical extensions to other fields of human endeavor.

Cupcakin’ it
5 Apr 2006
Here’s a little something for all the new readers sent our way from Baseball Prospectus.

“Thinking specifically about the F-word…”
2 Apr 2006
To round out a week of posts on profanity (most recently Roger Shuy’s droll April Fool’s Day spoof), let’s consider a new Associated Press poll on the subject conducted by the market research company Ipsos.

The straw dog of amnesty
31 Mar 2006
The debate over a Senate bill to legalize illegal immigrants has devolved into squabbling over the word “amnesty,” Dana Milbank reports in today’s Washington Post.

Twonk!
30 Mar 2006
If the researchers for a BBC-commissioned study can only find 28 rude words in British English, then they’re really not looking very hard.

Dakota Scrabble, anyone?
28 Mar 2006
Via Patrick Hall’s Blogamundo comes news of Scrabble being used to promote the learning of Dakota Sioux.

Of silos and stovepipes
28 Mar 2006
The Mar. 27 Wall Street Journal has an article filling its readers in on the very latest business buzzwords (available online here, but only for subscribers).

Word rage on the witness stand
24 Mar 2006
A hundred years ago, we had cartoons depicting orthography-inspired violence. Now, thanks to PartiallyClips, we have a comic strip about punctuation-inspired terrorism.

Further thoughts on “The Affect”
22 Mar 2006
As Mark Liberman notes, the recent New York Observer article on “The Affect” presents “a very mixed bag of phenomena” supposedly characterizing the speech of young upper-middle-class New York women.

Love, adverbially
18 Mar 2006
Daniel Handler, better known to kids everywhere as Lemony Snicket, apparently doesn’t agree with adverb-haters Elmore Leonard and Stephen King (“The road to hell is paved with adverbs,” King once wrote).

Instilling linguistic anxiety in Raachester
17 Mar 2006
For a scholarly work with the formidable list price of $620, the Atlas of North American English (by William Labov, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg) has been getting some nice press attention since its launch earlier this year.

A pirated Barbie-ism
11 Mar 2006
Veteran Wikipedian Leflyman sends along an intriguing early variation on the popular expression attributed to Teen Talk Barbie: Math is hard, let’s go shopping! (later snowcloned into X is hard, let’s go shopping!).

Engrish explained
11 Mar 2006
Illustrations of fractured English, particularly from East Asian countries, get passed around quite a lot online. There are even entire websites devoted to collecting absurd examples.

The Cupertino effect
9 Mar 2006
It turns out that the modern affliction of spellcheckers wreaking havoc on unsuspecting documents has been given a name.

Collocation provocation
8 Mar 2006
When Crash upset Brokeback Mountain at the Academy Awards, the entertainment blog Gawker added fuel to the anti-Crash fire by claiming, “Google Can’t Hide Its Oscar Disappointment.”

Mel’s Mayan mischief
6 Mar 2006
On last night’s Oscar broadcast, we finally learned what Mel Gibson meant when he said he wanted to make Mayan languages “cool again.”

Stumbling across the linguistic divide
6 Mar 2006
Via Language Hat comes another tale of spellchecking run amok.

Pioneers of word rage
5 Mar 2006
A few months ago Mark Liberman remarked on a phenomenon that seems peculiar to the English-speaking tradition: “word rage” — that is, disgust over non-normative language use accompanied by imagined physical harm to the transgressor.

The entire United States wept
3 Mar 2006
I recently came across an article in the Mainichi Daily News describing how Tokyo police officers have compiled a glossary of juvenile jargon to help them decipher what Japanese teenagers are saying.

Playing for the Dominican, skiing in Czech, working in Saudi
3 Mar 2006
New York Mets pitcher Pedro Martinez is nursing a sore toe, so he has opted against playing for the Dominican Republic in this month’s inaugural World Baseball Classic.

Tracking snowclones is hard. Let’s go shopping!
2 Mar 2006
Michael Kaplan recently offered up a snowclone in need of investigation: X is hard. Let’s go shopping!

On not emerging unscathed
2 Mar 2006
Soon after ABC News posted a transcript of Elizabeth Vargas’s breezy (and often vapid) interview with President Bush, bloggers were quickly picking apart every “um” and “ah” faithfully rendered by the network’s transcribers.

Multiple choice
27 Feb 2006
Three scholars in social psychology (Barry Schwartz, Hazel Rose Marks, and Alana Conner Snibbe) contributed a column to the Sunday New York Times Magazine under the headline, “Is Freedom Just Another Word for Many Things to Buy?

en language log splitter
26 Feb 2006
Anyone who has used a blog search engine or set up a blog feed knows that spam has thoroughly infested the blogosphere.

No snowclone left behind
25 Feb 2006
“On rare occasion, a political phrase becomes a template for a variety of causes,” writes William Safire in his Sunday “On Language” column.

A phonographic phony
23 Feb 2006
There’s a Belgian video clip (in French) that’s been making the rounds, purporting to show an amazing new archaeological find.

Linguistic enforcement, Canadian style
22 Feb 2006
When the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie wanted to ensure that French was strictly implemented as one of the official languages of the Winter Olympics, they dispatched just the right type of person to do the job.

The nesting of clauses that lay in the sentence that Cheney said
16 Feb 2006
“Well, ultimately, I’m the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry.” When I heard Dick Cheney’s admission to Brit Hume on FOX News, my first thought was: “Why is Cheney snowcloning ‘The House That Jack Built’?”

Odium against “podium”
15 Feb 2006
Based on my previous Olympic-y posts I’ve received two independent queries from readers wondering, “What’s the deal with these Olympics people using podium as a verb?”

“Torino” rolls along
15 Feb 2006
Confusion still reigns over NBC’s decision to refer to the Italian city hosting the Olympics as Torino rather than the traditional English name of Turin.

Feeling all Olympic-y
14 Feb 2006
The Winter Olympics is looking more and more like the trendy X Games, with new sports like snowboarding contributing to the “extreme makeover” of the Olympic Games.

How to countr orthographic offendrs
7 Feb 2006
David Giacalone of f/k/a takes a break from his efforts to eradicate the word “blawg” to alert us to a new linguistic menace: the creeping conversion of the agentive suffix “-er” to “-r” in trendy online names.

986120 words for snow job
6 Feb 2006
The subject of the Language Log final exam, loyal readers will recall, was a peculiar article in the New York Times real estate section on the power of buzzwords in the New York housing market.

Commercial hybridity, Super Bowl edition
4 Feb 2006
I was intrigued to read the news that one of the high-profile commercials running during the Super Bowl on Sunday would be bilingual, mixing English and Spanish.

Annals of animalistic analogies
3 Feb 2006
Here’s one of those odd coincidences. Earlier today I read Mark Liberman’s post about Vladimir Nabokov’s prophetic vision of emoticons, which links back to a post Mark wrote back in 2003 about Nabokov.

Tong-maker the Kong-maker, and other translational follies
2 Feb 2006
I recently read the news about an online English-Malay translation tool that promises “real-time translation and searching of the whole Internet in Malay.”

Jeopardy! strikes the wrong tone
31 Jan 2006
The game show Jeopardy! has something of a mixed record when it comes to language-related clues.

The cran-morphing of -dango
29 Jan 2006
On his blog Evolving English II, Mike Pope (aka “WordzGuy”) reflects on the name of a new job-searching website for the Pacific Northwest: Jobdango, evidently inspired by the movie ticketing service Fandango.

The dissing of hiphop linguistics
29 Jan 2006
On the anthroblog Savage Minds, Kerim Friedman takes note of a recent press release from the University of Calgary under the title “Hip hop and linguistics: you ain’t heard no research like it”.

Surprising crocodile kin
27 Jan 2006
It’s great having a brother who’s a noted science writer, especially one who’s a fellow blogger. Today Carl Zimmer’s blog (“The Loom”) has an entry about his New York Times article describing a fascinating new paleontological discovery.

Blawgs, phonolawgically speaking
24 Jan 2006
Mark Liberman commented last week on some complaints lodged against the neologism blawg, meaning ‘a law-related blog.’ David Giacalone of f/k/a dismissed the term as “an insider pun by a popular lawyer-webdiva (which should have been passed around and admired briefly as a witty one-off).”

Wordplay’s big splash at Sundance
23 Jan 2006
A couple of months ago we were pleased to bring you the news that Patrick Creadon’s documentary Wordplay had been accepted into competition at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.

Truthiness: a flash in the pan?
19 Jan 2006
Has the golden era of truthiness already passed? The above graph, generated by BlogPulse, suggests that inhabitants of the blogosphere are already losing interest in Stephen Colbert’s term for faux truth.

The birth of truthiness?
16 Jan 2006
Last week’s great truthiness debate is still raging in some corners, despite the fact that both the American Dialect Society and Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Show” have probably milked about as much publicity out of the spurious squabble as can be expected.

Forensic linguistics, the Unabomber, and the etymological fallacy
14 Jan 2006
It’s often been noted here at the Language Log that mass-media reporting on linguistic topics very often turns out to be frustratingly simplistic or misleading.

The truthiness wars rage on
12 Jan 2006
It was round two of Colbert vs. Adams Thursday night.

The evolution of “birdflu”
12 Jan 2006
Two headlines from today’s Reuters wire…

The [sic]ing of the President
11 Jan 2006
In November, when the White House Press Office sought to change transcripts of a briefing by Scott McClellan (who either thought that it was “accurate” or “not accurate” that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby were known to have had conversations about Valerie Plame), liberal bloggers were quick to invoke the usual dystopic Orwellian imagery.

Colbert fights for truthiness
9 Jan 2006
On Friday the American Dialect Society chose as its 2005 Word of the Year Stephen Colbert’s sublimely silly neologism truthiness.

Nias, Komodo, and “Kong”
8 Jan 2006
I have yet to find three hours to devote to Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong, but I did catch the original 100-minute version on Turner Classic Movies over the holidays.

The wordanistas have spoken
6 Jan 2006
Back in October, when Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert kicked off his faux-news show The Colbert Report, he promoted a new word that nailed the malleability of “truth” in today’s mediascape.

Happy Abramoffukkah!
4 Jan 2006
Another legal brouhaha, another celebratory blend. Last year we had Fitzmas and Kitzmas. This year kicks off with Abramoffuk(k)ah, commemorating Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s guilty plea earlier today.

From Nabisco to NaNoWriMo
30 Dec 2005
In my post yesterday critiquing Kevin Roberts’ coinage of sisomo (an acronymic blend of “sight, sound, and motion”), I stated that “extracting the first two letters from each word in a series is not a productive source of English neologizing.”

Does sisomo have sisomomentum?
29 Dec 2005
Sometimes it’s easy to spot neologisms that are bound to fail. But there can be a multitude of reasons why a freshly minted word or phrase turns out to be a nonstarter.

Kenzi, Camerair, and other hybrid beasts
27 Dec 2005
The recent outbreak of blends combining famous names — from Brangelina to Scalito — was notable enough to merit inclusion in the New York Times’ annual roundup of buzzwords.

“60 Minutes” doomed to repeat itself
24 Dec 2005
About halfway through the fourth quarter of the NFL matchup between the Indianapolis Colts and the Seattle Seahawks, one of the announcers for the CBS telecast delivered the standard rat-a-tat promo for upcoming shows on the networ

Negation, over- and under-
21 Dec 2005
Anything amiss in Monday’s installment of “Hagar the Horrible”? Well, other than the fact that — in the words of Josh Fruhlinger at The Comics Curmudgeon — “Hagar and Lucky Eddie are Odin-revering pagans and wouldn’t care about this so-called ‘Christmas’ anyway”?

Merry Kitzmas!
20 Dec 2005
Two months ago it was Fitzmas. Now the blend du jour is Kitzmas, and the occasion is the decision handed down today in Kitzmiller vs. Dover, the case regarding a Pennsylvania school board that tried to enforce the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in its science curriculum.

Snowclones hit the big time
5 Dec 2005
The humble study of snowclones, pursued in this space intermittently over the past two years, may be getting a significant boost in attention.

Neologism-tracking down under
2 Dec 2005
The monitoring of newly coined English words and phrases is, of course, not strictly an American activity, though it tends to be centered in the US since that’s where so much of the neologistic action is these days.

Wordplay Watch #1: Cruciverbalism on the silver screen
1 Dec 2005
What Spellbound did for spelling bees and Word Wars did for Scrabble, a new documentary hopes to do for the world of crossword puzzling.

Wordplay Watch #2: The hunt for the ten-square
1 Dec 2005
In other word-wrangling news, the Times of London has published an article on progress towards constructing a special kind of crossword called a word square, in which entries read the same across as down.

Football’s F-word
29 Nov 2005
After the Indianapolis Colts beat the Pittsburgh Steelers on Monday night, Indianapolis coach Tony Dungy was asked about the Colts being called a “f****** team.”

Cybermundanity
29 Nov 2005
How was your Cyber Monday? In case you missed out on the avalanche of hype, online retailers promoted yesterday as “Cyber Monday,” a brand-new coinage.

Presidential self-repair
28 Nov 2005
In case you missed that odd annual Thanksgiving ritual, the presidential turkey pardon, Bruce Reed provides a sarcastic blow-by-blow on Slate today.

Waiter, there’s a metaphor in my soup!
27 Nov 2005
Mark Liberman wonders about the origins of the expression in the soup, meaning “in great difficulty,” noting that an animal (or human) would prefer to be out of the soup than in it.

Churchill vs. editorial nonsense
27 Nov 2005
For a while I’ve been on the trail of a saying usually attributed to Winston Churchill: “This is the sort of arrant nonsense up with which I will not put” (or some variation thereof).

Parli Berluschese?
25 Nov 2005
American political discourse may have spawned Scalito, Fitzmas, and Miered, but it looks like Italy is way ahead of the US in the neologizing game.

Life in these, uh, this United States
24 Nov 2005
It’s Thanksgiving, the high holy day of the American civil religion, and as good a time as any to reflect on the terms America and the United States.

Further adventures in “self” expression
22 Nov 2005
I’ve received a number of interesting responses to my recent post on the expression, (So) I say(s) to myself, “Self…”, which has still only been documented since the 1980s, surprisingly enough.

Alphabet wars: an update
21 Nov 2005
When it was first revealed that an abecedary from the 10th century BCE had been unearthed near Tel Zayit, Israel, initial coverage in the New York Times and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (as well as a follow-up from the Chicago Tribune wire service) suggested that a major scholarly conflict over the artifact’s interpretation was looming.

So I says to myself, “Self, what’s up with these Googlecounts?”
20 Nov 2005
In my recent post on the difficulties of Googlinguistics, I heeded Mark Liberman’s warning to be suspicious about the reliability of Googlecounts much greater than 100000.

Googlinguistics: the good, the bad, and the ugly
16 Nov 2005
Language Log popped up rather unexpectedly today in an entry on Peter Suber’s Open Access News, an informative blog collecting reports on the open access movement.

Eating, drinking, sleeping snowclones, part 2: the early years
15 Nov 2005
In our last installment we catalogued the efflorescence of the “X eats, drinks, and sleeps Y” snowclone in its multitudinous forms, culled from a century or so of American newspaper appearances.

Eating, drinking, sleeping snowclones
15 Nov 2005
In an attempt to parse the Tom Paine quote “It sleeps obedience,” Eric Bakovic ended up chasing a tangent, but what a very interesting tangent it is.

Alphabet wars
13 Nov 2005
Controversy has been brewing since last week’s announcement that a team of archaeologists had discovered an ancient alphabetic inscription on a stone unearthed near Tel Zayit, Israel.

Bierce’s Law?
12 Nov 2005
Mark Liberman exposes a new victim of the “Law of Prescriptive Retaliation” — the Murphy-esque principle that corrections of linguistic error are themselves inevitably prone to error.

Stereotypography
11 Nov 2005
On her Abecedaria blog, Suzanne E. McCarthy draws our attention to the title of a new film adapting Jane Austen’s most famous work: Pride & Prejudice.

“I don’t think that’s accurate”? I don’t think that’s accurate
10 Nov 2005
The official transcripts archived at the White House website tend to be relatively trustworthy representations of public speaking by President Bush and other officials.

Disentangling the entanglements
9 Nov 2005
The announced “retirement” of Judith Miller from the New York Times helps to resolve a couple of loose ends from my Oct. 24 post, “Semantic entanglements.”

The oldest Hebrew alphabet?
8 Nov 2005
The New York Times reports on a fascinating archeological discovery made in Tel Zayit, southwest of Jerusalem: a stone dated to the 10th century BCE inscribed with an abecedary (the letters of the alphabet written in their traditional order).

Making Yucatec Maya “cool again”
7 Nov 2005
Back in July we heard the intriguing news that Mel Gibson’s next film project, Apocalypto, would be shot entirely in “Mayan.”

Guttural politics
5 Nov 2005
On Friday, in the waning days of a nasty gubernatorial race in New Jersey, Democratic candidate Jon Corzine was confronted by reporters about allegations of an extramarital affair with one of his former staffers.

There ain’t no sanity clause…
3 Nov 2005
So saith the renowned legal scholar Chico Marx. There is, however, a “liberty clause.”

Squabbles over “Scalito”
2 Nov 2005
The original round of reporting on Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court introduced us to the nickname Scalito, interpreted as either a blend of Scalia and Alito or a diminutivization of Scalia (or both).

Language Log talks, Paper of Record listens
1 Nov 2005
I think we’re getting some solid results from the New York Times. First, Maureen Dowd’s crocheted/croqueted mixup was resolved, albeit with no mention of the correction. Now Alessandra Stanley’s truthiness/trustiness gaffe has finally been rectified.

Literally: a history
1 Nov 2005
Yet another usage bugaboo decried as the death of English turns out to have a long and venerable history. This time it’s literally used not so literally.

A perilous portmanteau?
31 Oct 2005
It remains to be seen if the new Supreme Court nominee, Judge Samuel Alito, will earn an eponymous verb like Bork, Souter, and Miers. But he’s already responsible for a somewhat dubious contribution to the lexicon.

More Dowdese
31 Oct 2005
Fascinating. The “orange croqueted halter dress” that originally appeared in Maureen Dowd’s piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine has magically changed to “orange crocheted halter dress” in the online edition.

Needling the Times
30 Oct 2005
On the subject of spellchecker artifacts in the New York Times, the Boston Globe’s Jan Freeman emails the following oddity from Maureen Dowd’s piece in the Sunday Magazine, “What’s a Modern Girl to Do?”

The first “Fitzmas”
30 Oct 2005
Tracking neologisms in American English has a long and distinguished tradition. An early master was Dwight Bolinger (1907-1992), who began keeping tabs on the latest words and phrases in 1937 with his regular column “The Living Language” in the journal Words.

The longue duree is not our forte
28 Oct 2005
An article about English usage by Candace Murphy in the Oct. 25 edition of “Inside Bay Area” (a publication of the Oakland Tribune) underscores the pitfalls of the “Recency Illusion.”

Miered in doubt
27 Oct 2005
Now that she has withdrawn her name from the Supreme Court nomination process, what will the linguistic legacy of Harriet Miers be?

Artifacts of the spellchecker age
26 Oct 2005
The New York Times has yet to issue a correction for the joke-ruining error in its Oct. 25 review of “The Colbert Report.”

Truthiness or trustiness?
25 Oct 2005
The New York Times has bigger headaches to deal with right now, but they blew the punchline to some linguistic humor that appeared in last week’s premiere of “The Colbert Report.”

Peeveblogging
24 Oct 2005
Lately it seems as if everywhere you look there are practitioners of what Deborah Cameron has called “verbal hygiene.”

Semantic entanglements
24 Oct 2005
Back in July, Mark Liberman wrote that “the Valerie Plame story is all about referential opacity and felicity conditions for speech acts and other issues in philosophy of language.”

Tingo and other lingo (guest post)
27 Sep 2005
A burgeoning new field in pop linguistics consists of gathering together words and phrases in the world’s languages that are deemed “untranslatable” into English (or at least lack a tidy lexical translation-equivalent).

Who is this exalted parrot? (guest post)
22 Sep 2005
Geoff Pullum and Mark Liberman have bemoaned the pernicious Strunkism averring that the plural of person should only be persons and never people.

“Grammar cranks” of the right (guest post)
29 Aug 2005
Linguistic persnicketiness is certainly not restricted to any particular political ideology. But prescriptivist gripes are sometimes grounded in a conservative distaste for loosey-goosey moral relativism and the like.

A misattribution no longer to be put up with (guest post)
14 Dec 2004
The earliest citation of the story that I’ve found so far in newspaper databases is from 1942, without any reference to Churchill.

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