Interview on “At Issue with Ben Merens” (Wisconsin Public Radio) on the notable words of 2011. (Dec. 13, 2011)
The following are just some of the new words of 2011 – supercommittee, occupy, Arab spring, winning, planking and narb. After five, join Ben Merens and his guest as they discuss the words of 2011. What new words did you hear this year? Guest: Ben Zimmer, executive producer, VisualThesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com. Language columnist, The Boston Globe. Former “On Language” columnist, The New York Times Magazine. Formerly editor, American dictionaries, Oxford University Press. Chair, New Words Committee, American Dialect Society.
Interview on WNYC’s “The Leonard Lopate Show” about the most significant words of 2011. (Dec. 13, 2011)
Wordsmith Ben Zimmer talks about the year in words—from “occupy” to “supercommittee” to “bunga bunga” to “tiger mother.” He’ll also look at some of the phrases, like “leading from behind” and “win the future” to tell us what the national vocabulary reveals about 2011. Ben Zimmer writes a biweekly language column for the Boston Globe and is the former “On Language” columnist for The New York Times Magazine. He’s also executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com.
Interview on “Eight Forty-Eight” (WBEZ Chicago), about notable words of the year. (Dec. 13, 2011)
When the end of the year rolls around, people start making their best of lists–from music to movies, news stories and news makers. But could one word sum up an entire year? According to the American Dialect Society, it can. In early January, the group will choose one word to rule the year. There were plenty of words in contention, including humblebrag, narb and Mubaraked. To find out more, Eight Forty-Eight turned to Ben Zimmer, a University of Chicago alum, and executive producer of the VisualThesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com.
The word of the year will be chosen by the American Dialect Society on Jan. 6.
Just as in the offline world, Zimmer says, fluency with such buzzy terms signals that a person is in-the-know, and indeed part of the cultural conversation. The key difference on social media is the speed at which others can catch on and join in, ultimately investing in a neologism’s stickiness.
“It’s playing an increasingly big role in language, having an effect both on the spread of new words and the ability to observe them,” says Zimmer. “But it’s also a little dangerous because we can get so caught up in what’s happening on social media that we think it’s representative of the entire world.”
In an “On the Media” interview, Ben Zimmer, head of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society, said: Occupy “is this extremely useful word for the movement because as it spread[s] to other cities, it can very easily just work as a kind of a template. Occupy blank, Occupy the-name-of-your-town-here….”
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.”
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.”
Language guru Ben Zimmer has tracked down what he believes to be the source of the phrase. He writes that the term originated in the 1960s in Philadelphia. Traffic was so bad the day after Thanksgiving that police officers had to work 12-hour shifts. So they gave the day a negative — and memorable — name.
Ben Zimmer is a self-described all-around word nut. He is the former On Language columnist for The New York Times Magazine, the executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com (an entirely useful tool when you’re looking to add color to your prose) and vocabulary.com.
In a recent New York Times Sunday Review column where he claims that “Twitterology” is the latest hot new science, he writes that “Twitter is many things to many people, but lately it has been a gold mine for scholars in fields like linguistics, sociology and psychology who are looking for real-time data to analyze.”
Now in its 16th edition, The Chicago Manual of Style is the must-have reference for everyone who works with words. On November 8th a panel of experts convened at International House to discuss both the history of this authoritative text and its relevance in an era where instantaneous global publication is only a tap, text, or tweet away. Audience participation was encouraged via live polling on matters of usage and style and submitting comments and questions via Twitter. The discussion was moderated by Alison Cuddy, host of WBEZ’s award-winning news magazine Eight Forty-Eight.