Graeme Hamilton, “At the Dictionary Society of North America, Words Matter — a Lot” (National Post, June 11, 2011)
Benjamin Zimmer has been a dictionary buff since he was a child. The executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and former On Language columnist for the New York Times Magazine, remembers thumbing the onion-skin pages of the Webster’s Second New International Dictionary his family kept on a stand in his home.
During university 20 years ago, he volunteered as a reader for the OED, scouring music magazines for examples of new musical terms. He’s not bragging, but the dictionary’s inclusion of “techno-” to define sub-genres of music? That was him.
Read the rest here.