The word “meta” has become an inescapable part of the pop culture zeitgeist. In early May, the Boston Globepublished a column by Ben Zimmer about the word’s seeming omnipresence. Zimmer also appeared on NPR to discuss it, saying, “The way [meta] gets used now really refers to anything that is self referential, self parodying in some way in this kind of recursive fashion.”
In its original usage, Zimmer writes, meta means “‘above or beyond’ (the metaphysical realm is beyond the physical one) or ‘at a higher level of abstraction.’” Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction falls into the latter camp.
Interview on Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Daily Circuit” about how words explain our world. (May 21, 2012)
We check in with The Daily Circuit linguists for the latest trends in language. What words have become especially popular given the cultural climate? Why is “austere” one of the most-searched words on the web? What are some holes in our language and how can we fill them?
This just in! Ben Zimmer heeded the Mad Men anachronism bat signal I sent up in my post this morning, weighing in with a definitive email about Roger’s use of “impactful.” Zimmer, an authority on these matters, gives the usage a certificate of authenticity.
Interview on “At Issue with Ben Merens” (Wisconsin Public Radio) on how our names influence who we are. (May 15, 2012)
Assigning a name to someone is a social act in our culture. So, what’s in a name? After three, join Ben Merens and his guest as they discuss how our names influence who we are. GUEST: Ben Zimmer is executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com. He writes a biweekly language column for The Boston Globe and is the former “On Language” columnist for The New York Times Magazine.
Ben Zimmer’s Sunday language column about the word “meta” describes how it changed from meaning “above and beyond” to mean “consciously self-referential.” It is, as he writes in the clever beginning of the piece in which he imagines writing the column, “a perfect meta-commentary on the consciously self-referential age we live in.”
A couple weeks ago, weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz sent an email to Ben Zimmer, a language columnist at the Boston Globe.
“Ben,” he wrote, “Every 20-something on my staff uses the word ‘meta’ all the time — as in ‘That’s so meta.’ Did I miss something?”
Zimmer responded with a 400-word mini-essay affirming that, yes, “meta” has indeed been working its way to more popular usage over the last decade or so.
“Everything in the culture, it seems, can instantly become self-referential, self-conscious, and self-parodying, increasingly driven by the frenzied feedback loop of social networking and electronic communication,” Zimmer wrote. “Your young staffers take all of this for granted.”
Talk given to the Anthropology section of the New York Academy of Sciences on new data-driven approaches to investigating linguistic phenomena. (Apr. 30, 2012)
The last Monday in April marks the final 2011/2012 meeting of the Anthropology section of the New York Academy of Sciences at the Wenner-Gren Foundation. We’ve had a great range of presenters this season, and for this last session we welcome the first presentation dealing explicitly with linguistic anthropology. Ben Zimmer of ThinkMap, Inc. and the Boston Globe, best known for previously penning the column “On Language” in the New York Times, will discuss the emergent linguistics of digital communication – and the new tools used to study it – with discussants Melissa Checker of Queens College and Rudolf Gaudio of SUNY Purchase.
Interview on WNYC’s “The Leonard Lopate Show” about the contentious history of the word “supercalifragilisticexpialodocious” (Apr. 27, 2012).
Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Boston Globe and executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, tells the untold story behind the word “supercalifragilisticexpialodocious.” He wrote about it in his latest Boston Globe column.
Interview on WBUR’s Radio Boston on the unexpected baseball roots of the word “jazz.” (Apr. 9, 2012)
As Boston baseball fans prepare to celebrate the 100th birthday of Fenway Park, there’s another important centenntial involving the national pastime: it’s about how baseball gave us jazz. It turns out that the word “jazz” has an unlikely history. It starts 100 years ago with an obscure baseball player named Ben Henderson.
Henderson was a washed up pitcher with the Pacific Coast League with a reputation as an unreliable drunk, so his career never amounted to much. But back in 1912, he told a reporter about a new pitch he had developed, and became the first person known to use the word “Jazz.”
“And he told the reporter that he had a special pitch, a curve ball called “the jazz ball” that he was going to use, and he said it would completely flummox the batters because it wobbles so much you simply can’t do anything with it,” said Ben Zimmer, the language columnist for The Boston Globe and producer of visualthesaurus.com and vocabulary.com.
According to Zimmer, 100 years ago Henderson was playing for the Portland Beavers out in Oregon. And while his taste for liquor proved fatal to his baseball career, his description of his “jazz ball” turned out to be a major linguistic legacy.
It happened when one Ben Henderson, a pitcher for the 1912 Portland Beavers, told a Los Angeles Times reporter that he had a new curve ball he called a “jazz ball.” It hit the paper on April 2nd with the headline “Ben’s Jazz Curve.”