Interview with Patt Morrison on Southern California Public Radio about taking over the “On Language” column.
The New York Times Magazine’s “On Language” column has a new voice, lexicographer and linguist Ben Zimmer. Zimmer, who also serves as executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, has a big sentence structure to fill. He’ll succeed the late wordsmith William Safire, who founded the column in 1979 and was the regular columnist until he died last fall. Will the column change… we’ll find out this weekend when Ben Zimmer takes over.