Sarah Kliff, “Can Obama Reclaim ‘Obamacare?’” (Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog, Washington Post, Apr. 9, 2012)
Linguist Ben Zimmer digs into previous presidents’ attempts to own their eponyms and finds success largely hinges on the popularity of the policy:
Events on the ground have dictated the fate of other personalized political words, such as those in the “-nomics” family. “Nixonomics” was originally suggested within the Nixon White House in the summer of 1969, in a memo circulated by a young speechwriter named William Safire. But by that fall, “Nixonomics” was already being used disparagingly in the press. Thus, when “Reaganomics” came into use during Ronald Reagan’s first term, it carried the bad old whiff of “Nixonomics” and was a popular putdown among Democrats. When the economy recovered, however, the term lost its bite, and Reagan proudly ran on “Reaganomics” in his 1984 reelection campaign.
Personalizing the political worked the worst for President Hoover, who was plagued by numerous eponyms, most notably the shantytowns called “Hoovervilles.”
(Related Boston Globe column)
Carey Goldberg, “Neutralizing The Term ‘Obamacare’” (Common Health, WBUR blog, Apr. 9, 2012)
I seem to be willfully tone-deaf to political nuance. But that’s not the only explanation for why I’ve been blithely using “Obamacare” in our headlines, insensitive to the negative spin put on the term by the president’s foes. It’s just simply the shortest, liveliest way to say “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” far pithier than “the federal health care overhaul.”
So when I read Ben Zimmer’s fun column in Sunday’s Globe about President Obama’s attempts to take back the term and turn it positive, I thought, “Let’s all take back the term! Can’t we all just consider it a neutral term and make life easier for headline writers everywhere?” Just for the records, that’s how we use it. Change starts here.
Read the rest here.
Interview on WBEZ’s Eight Forty-Eight about the role of baseball in the origins of the word “jazz” a century ago. (Apr. 5, 2012)
Baseball season is upon us, and in honor of America’s pastime, Eight Forty-Eight brings you a special sports edition of Music Thursdays. During the show, Boston Globe language columnist Ben Zimmer will explain how the word “jazz” travelled from the West Coast to Chicago 100 years ago (hint: it has something to do with baseball).
(Show page, audio, related Boston Globe column, Word Routes column)
On his Daily Beast blog “The Dish,” Andrew Sullivan features an excerpt from Lapham’s Quarterly, “Word for Word“:
Ben Zimmer chronicles writers’ love-hate relationship with the thesaurus. It began with Peter Mark Roget’s first edition in 1852:
Roget’s thesaurus was crucially a conceptual undertaking, and, according to Roget’s deeply held religious beliefs, a tribute to God’s work. His efforts to create order out of linguistic chaos harks back to the story of Adam in the Garden of Eden, who was charged with naming all that was around him, thereby creating a perfectly transparent language. It was, according to the theology of St. Augustine, a language that would lose its perfection with the Fall of Man, and then irreparably shatter following construction of the Tower of Babel.
By Roget’s time, Enlightenment ideals had taken hold, suggesting that scientific pursuits and rational inquiry could discover antidotes to Babel, if not a return to the perfect language of Adam. Though we no longer cling so tightly to these Enlightenment notions about language in our postmodern age, we still carry with us Roget’s legacy, the view that language can somehow be wrangled and rationalized by fitting the lexicon into tidy conceptual categories.
Ari Shapiro, “‘Obamacare’ Sounds Different When Supporters Say It” (NPR Weekend Edition, Mar. 31, 2012)
Linguist Ben Zimmer, executive producer of Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, says there’s a long history of groups trying to reclaim negative words.
“So for instance, the term ‘queer,’ which is a very pejorative term, in fact was reclaimed by members of the gay community as a neutral or positive term,” he says, “to the extent that now you have queer studies at universities, for instance.”
In politics, he says, whether a term is positive or negative often hinges on outside events.
“During Ronald Reagan’s first term, ‘Reaganomics’ was generally a negative epithet,” he says, “but by 1984, the economy had turned around, and Ronald Reagan in fact embraced the term ‘Reaganomics.’ “
(Show page, audio, related Boston Globe column)
Interview on “The Conversation with Ross Reynolds” (KUOW Seattle) about the shifting perceptions of the term “Obamacare” (Mar. 27, 2012)
The President’s Affordable Care Act has come to be known to many as simply, Obamacare after being given that nickname by Republicans. Now the left, including the President, is embracing it despite the fact that the term is politically loaded. Language writer Ben Zimmer joins us to discuss the power of language and reclaiming terms in politics.
(Show page, related Boston Globe column)
Interviewed by the Voice of America (Special English Division) about the completion of the Dictionary of American Regional English, “Words and Their Stories: A Final D.A.R.E.” (Mar. 24, 2012)
Linguist Ben Zimmer writes about language for the Boston Globe. He was not the only one excited at Ms. Hall’s first public showing of the final DARE volume. It was at a meeting of the American Dialect Society in January.
BEN ZIMMER: “We all gathered together in the conference room and Joan showed off volume five. And there were audible gasps in the room. I mean, it might as well have been accompanied by an angelic chorus. People just wanted to touch it like it was the holy relic or something.”
(Show page, audio)
Interviewed on the CBC Radio Show “Q with Jian Ghomeshi” about Lily Rothman’s suggestion that gal should be used as the feminine equivalent of guy (at 5 minutes into the segment). (Mar. 22, 2012)
(Show page, audio)
Jacqueline Trescott, “Dictionary of American Regional English Completed” (Style blog, Washington Post, Mar. 21, 2012)
What also sets [The Dictionary of American Regional English] apart, said Ben Zimmer, the executive producer of Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, is a sense of discovery and familiarity. These are words and expressions, he said, that “you are not going to find in other dictionaries.”
Read the rest here.