Ben Zimmer

Rebecca Hiscott, “Oxford English Dictionary Deigns to Allow Twitter’s Definition of ‘Tweet’ Into Its Hallowed Tome” (Betabeat, June 14, 2013)

According to lexicographer Ben Zimmer, the general rule of thumb for the OED is that a word must be in use for around ten years to warrant inclusion, but the rules can be relaxed, particularly in the case of tech-related words.

“It’s happened a few times when it comes to ‘techie’ words that have taken off very quickly,” Mr. Zimmer told Betabeat. “Two examples are Google, as a verb, and podcast, as a noun or verb. Both of those took off quickly enough that the [OED] felt the words were entrenched enough and weren’t going anywhere.”

“The criteria are really just that it needs to have a very strong record in terms of print sources,” he added. “So if ‘tweet’ is appearing everywhere in major publications, then there’s really no denying that it’s become firmly fixed in the lexicon.”

Read the rest here.

“Who Says What, Where” (Harvard University Press Blog, June 10, 2013)

Last week the internet caught fire with a bit of love for language, as it is blessedly wont to do. The spark this time was a collection of North Carolina State University PhD candidate Joshua Katz’s visualizations of regional dialect variations, which were presented at Business Insider, where they racked up tens of millions of views and quickly spread.

Over at Language Log, Ben Zimmer notes that the research behind Katz’s heat-map visualizations has been available for about a decade, and that—despite having been collected via not-quite-ideal online elicitation—it has been frequently repurposed over the years since it was produced by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. Though the frequent obscuring of the data’s origins and potential shortcomings is a perhaps lamentable result of the workings of internet virality, it’s nevertheless truly exciting for the word nerds among us to see linguistic lighting strike the web.

As Zimmer also notes, such “voracious public appetite for dialect maps” likely bodes well for the forthcoming digital edition of the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Read the rest here.

Interview on the WBUR show “Here and Now” about euphemisms and dysphemisms for dying. (June 7, 2013).

Has “dying” gone out of style? And how do we know whether to say someone has died, versus “passed away”?

We asked word guru Ben Zimmer, executive producer of The Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, and former “On Language” columnist for the New York Times. He told us:

I wouldn’t say it’s falling out of favor. But in American English — as in other varieties of English and other languages — there can be many, many different ways of describing death.

There’s the straight forward verb “to die.” But then we have more euphemistic expressions.

So something like “to pass away” softens the image of death a little bit. That term is probably the most favored euphemism for death.

But, you know, actually in journalism they tell you if you’re writing an obituary, you should say “die” instead of “pass away” or something poetic like “departed this life.”

Death is one of those areas that attracts a lot of euphemisms. Sometimes the euphemistic terms may be religious and focusing on the afterlife. So, if you say someone is “going to depart this life” or “meet his maker.”

But you know, English is a very rich language, and it has not just euphemisms, which make things softer, but also dysphemisms, which make things rougher and blunter.

So we have these colorful idioms like “kick the bucket” or “cash in your chips” or “buy the farm.” There are all sorts of rough and ready expressions that we use for death when we’re not being so careful.

(Show page)

Appearance on Fox NY News, “What Are the Most-Hated Words in the English Language?” (May 30, 2013)

Are there words that you absolutely hate either because of their meaning or just because of the way they sound?

Ben Zimmer, a linguist and executive producer of Vocabulary.com, said “word aversion” is the term linguists use to describe the visceral reaction some people have to words that really bother them. He said many hated words have to do with bodily functions.

“Moist” is so heavily despised, detested, loathed and abhorred it even has its own Facebook pages, but there are plenty of others.

Tierney Sneed, “Do All These #PopSongs Mean the Hashtag Is Here to Stay?” (U.S. News, May 21, 2013)

“Used in many creative ways, the hashtag ends up being used in jokes, for various memes, for self effacing commentary — a kind of meta-commentary on one’s message,” says Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, and a language columnist for the Boston Globe. “It was a very sort of simple straight forward convention that developed on Twitter that people invested with all sorts of special uses.”

Read the rest here.

Motoko Rich, “Making a Word Meme” (New York Times, May 19, 2013)

The phrase ["lean in"] had a life before Ms. [Sheryl] Sandberg used it. It was frequently invoked in sports (lean in to the slope, lean in to the wave) and evolved into a metaphor for embracing risk, said Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, and language columnist for The Boston Globe.

Read the rest here.

Interview on WBUR’s “Radio Boston” about the origins of the slogan “Boston Strong.” (May 16, 2013)

In the wake of the Boston marathon bombings, two words have become famously associated with the city’s response: “Boston Strong.”  You see it and hear it everywhere — and it’s become a handy short-hand for defiance, solidarity and caring. But where does this verbal branding come from and what makes it so powerful?

(Show page, audio, related Boston Globe column, Word Routes column)

Adrienne LaFrance, “The Language of Tragedy” (Medium, May 16, 2013)

Euphemisms inevitably sprout in the wake of disaster. Consider the word yesterday, which suddenly meant something specific and terrible on April 16, 2013.

I noticed this new yesterday while I was in Boston reporting on the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. People there weren’t calling them “the marathon bombings.” They weren’t calling the attacks anything, really, even though the bombings were all anyone was talking about.

It got me wondering: What determines how we talk about nightmarish events? And what happens once yesterday turns into last month or last year or last century?

But first: Back to April 16, when yesterday was all you had to say. “Yesterday,” or “the thing that happened,” or “it.”

“The purpose of the euphemism is really to alleviate some sense of trouble that you might feel if you were to use more direct language,” the linguist Ben Zimmer told me; it’s a way of “covering up or avoiding deeper emotions.”

Read the rest here.

Interview on Minnesota Public Radio’s The Daily Circuit about the “surreal” words we use at times of collective tragedy.

As people in Boston and beyond struggled to make sense of the marathon bombings last month, the news media churned out reports that started to follow a pattern.

Ben Zimmer, the language columnist for The Boston Globe, spent time reflecting on the bombings and their impact on people’s reactions. He noted that the words used to describe the bombings mirrored a trend that followed 9/11: The word “surreal” popped up in both instances.

Writing in The Globe, Zimmer offered a theory about why this was so: People use the word “when our mundane day-to-day experiences of life seem to move into some other dimension that our rational minds cannot account for. As with 9/11, it is not surprising to see ‘surreal’ paired with ‘like a movie’: Cinematic images of terror, disaster, and panic may be our closest touchstones.”

With the rise of social media, it did not take long for “surreal” to spike in usage after the bombings. Along with “surreal,” other superlatives are often employed in the coverage of breaking news events.

Zimmer joins The Daily Circuit to talk about the use of superlatives and other language trends.

(Show page, related Boston Globe column, Word Routes column)