Johnson, the language blog of The Economist, on the new coinage, “Zimmering.”
GEOFF NUNBERG thinks he may have coined the word “logotariat” for people who write informally about language, and he’s probably right. He googled it when he wrote it and found no hits (and five years ago, the internet already had around 10 trillion words on it). He’s not certain, though—making certain would take “more intense Zimmering than I’m capable of”. He might have coined a second word there; “to Zimmer” would be to trace a word back to its earliest usages, antedating others’ claims of the first recorded usage, as Ben Zimmer (of the New York Times) expertly does.
Read the rest here.