Karen Seidman, “Chillax, English is Always Evolving” (Montreal Gazette, June 10, 2011)
Welcome to the world of lexicography, where the guy who will be speaking Saturday about the emergence of the hip-hop lexis looks more like a Yale preppy (he was) than DJ Master Funk.
That would be Ben Zimmer, executive producer of visualthesaurus.com and vocabulary.com, the former New York Times Magazine language columnist who took over from esteemed etymologist William Safire, a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary and chairman of the American Dialect Society’s New Words Committee.
Yes, in other words, a major geek.
Read the rest here.