John E. McIntyre, “A Distinctively American Dictionary” (The Baltimore Sun, Mar. 9, 2012)
The National Endowment for the Humanities threw a reception at the Old Post Office Building in Washington for the publication of the fifth and concluding volume of [The Dictionary of American Regional English]. Joan Houston Hall, the chief editor, and Ben Zimmer, the linguist, spoke about the heroic accomplishment, and family members of the late Frederic Cassidy, the original editor, were present to share in the triumph. …
While the gaudier locutions catch the public eye, Mr. Zimmer pointed out that many of the little things, such as prepositions, will be of immense interest to lexicographers.
Read the rest here.
Participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities press conference announcing the completion of the Dictionary of American Regional English.
The National Endowment for the Humanities held a press conference on March 8, 2012, in its offices in Washington, D.C., to announce the completion of DARE‘s text with the publication of Volume V in March. Joan Houston Hall, DARE’s Chief Editor, and Ben Zimmer, Visual Thesaurus executive producer and language columnist for the Boston Globe, discuss the significance of the Dictionary‘s completion.
More information here.
Ian Simpson, “US Regional Dictionary Gets In Last Word As It Wraps Up Work” (Reuters, Mar. 8, 2012)
The American Dictionary of Regional English has finally reached its final word – “zydeco” – as researchers wrap up almost 50 years of work charting the rich variety of American speech.
The dictionary’s official publication date is March 20 but lexicographers and word fans have been celebrating ever since its fifth and final volume emerged earlier this year.
“It truly is America’s dictionary,” Ben Zimmer, a language columnist and lexicographer, told a Washington, D.C. news conference on Thursday.
He said when the final printed volume was delivered to its longtime editor, Joan Houston Hall, at a meeting of fellow dialect scholars: “There were audible gasps in the room.”
Read the rest here.
Interviewed on “The Diane Rehm Show” about the completion of the Dictionary of American Regional English, with DARE editor Joan Houston Hall. (Mar. 7, 2012)
In Ohio, the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb is called a “tree lawn.” In other parts of the country, it is a “curb,” a “devil’s strip,” a “parkway,” a “swale,” or a “street lawn.” More than a dozen names for this can be found in the Dictionary of American Regional English. The fifth volume covers words and phrases from ‘slab’ to ‘zydeco’ and completes a fifty-year project to capture the unique ways people in different parts of the country speak. The dictionary has been used to solve crimes, teach medical students, train actors, and understand political candidates. Joan Hall, chief editor of the dictionary, and linguist Ben Zimmer join Diane to discuss the diversity of American language.
(Show page, audio, related Boston Globe column)
On his Daily Beast blog “The Dish,” Andrew Sullivan is intrigued by “The Roots Of ‘Meh’“:
Ben Zimmer studies up:
Yiddish appears to be the ultimate source. I checked with Ben Sadock, a Yiddish expert in New York, and he turned up a tantalizing early example. In the 1928 edition of his Yiddish-English-Hebrew dictionary, Alexander Harkavy included the word meh (written in the corresponding Hebrew letters) and glossed it as an interjection meaning “be it as it may” and an adjective meaning “so-so.” (Meh is also used in Yiddish to represent the bleating of goats, but Sadock doesn’t think the two types of meh are necessarily related.)
From Zimmer’s blog:
[“The Simpsons” writer John] Swartzwelder did have a memory of where he first came across meh, though it wasn’t in Mad. “I had originally heard the word from an advertising writer named Howie Krakow back in 1970 or 1971 who insisted it was the funniest word in the world,” he told me.
Gene Owen, “Buck’s English: People Didn’t ‘Man Up’ in JFK’s Day” (The Oklahoman, Feb. 28, 2012)
Jeff Cook, of Seminole, was reading a piece of fiction about John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. One of the characters urges another character to “man up.”
“I have lived through those times,” said Jeff, “and don’t remember hearing that until the last couple of years. Is there any way to track when a phrase started gaining in popularity?”
One way to do it, Jeff, is to consult someone who has already done it. Ben Zimmer, who writes the column, “On Language,” for The New York Times, looked into the origins of the verbal phrase. His research indicates that you’ve caught the author in an anachronism.
Read the rest here. (Related On Language column)
Interview on WBUR’s Radio Boston about the roots of the Boston accent and Richard Bailey’s book “Speaking American.” (Feb. 27, 2012)
It’s widely believed that Boston Brahmin deliberately kept up their British accents as a way of displaying their elite English pedigrees. That may be true, but research by University of Michigan scholar Richard Bailey suggests it was Bostonians who first started dropping the letter ‘R’ from words when they spoke, and only then did the practice actually spread back to England.
That’s just one of the revelations in Bailey’s new book “Speaking American: A History of English in the United States.”
Sadly, Richard Bailey died last year before he could see his work published. But linguist Ben Zimmer examined Bailey’s work closely and joined Radio Boston to discuss Bailey’s findings.
(show page, audio, related Boston Globe column)
Richard Sandomir, “When Brain, Fingers and Vocal Cords Drop the Connection” (New York Times, Feb. 22, 2012)
Ben Zimmer, the language columnist for The Boston Globe, said the expression [“chink”] — about a rupture in something — comes from Middle English and has no Chinese roots. Its derogatory meaning developed in British-American usage in the late 19th or early 20th century.
He said that there were various explanations for how “chink” came to be related to China.
“But the whole idea that the phrase has double meaning is not new,” he said, adding that linguists talk about “taboo avoidance” to refer to not using an expression that has a negative meaning.
Read the rest here.