Katy Steinmetz, “What Is 2011’s Word of the Year?” (Time Newsfeed, Dec. 7, 2011)
humblebrag—This is one of language guru Ben Zimmer’s favorites, not least because it was actually coined in 2011 (rather than taking on new meaning, like occupy). The term, referring to “bragging that masks the brag in a faux-humble guise,” was made famous through a Twitter feed of that name. A classic example might be, “Oh, I feel so violated when people run up out of nowhere to tell me how attractive I am.”
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Jessen O’Brien, “Uniquely Chicago: Ben Zimmer” (University of Chicago college website).
Ben Zimmer has always played with words. Throughout his childhood, he found himself turning to the dictionary again and again for amusement. “I was a dictionary buff,” said Zimmer. “When I was a kid I’d look up these obscure words in beautiful dictionaries from the 1930s, words like ucalegon that you could never use in a conversation.”
Currently, the executive producer of Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com as well as former New York Times “On Language” columnist, Zimmer (AM’98), continued his pursuit of words at Yale, where he studied linguistics, and then the University of Chicago, where he studied linguistic anthropology. While working on his masters, he traveled to Indonesia to study a local language and became fascinated with how folklore and word play affected its usage. Yet some of his favorite memories of that time take place in Haskell Hall, “bonding with my cohorts in Systems,” a.k.a. “the Anthro grad students’ boot camp.”
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