Interview on NPR’s Morning Edition about the murky origins of the term “hot dog.” (July 4, 2011)
On Monday, New York’s Coney Island will host Nathan’s Famous annual hot dog eating contest. The contest is in its 96th year.
But, the origin of the popular summer food is still cloudy.
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the online magazine Visual Thesaurus, says there are a lot of myths about the name ‘hot dog.’
(Show page, audio, transcript, related Word Routes column)
Graeme Hamilton, “At the Dictionary Society of North America, Words Matter — a Lot” (National Post, June 11, 2011)
Benjamin Zimmer has been a dictionary buff since he was a child. The executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and former On Language columnist for the New York Times Magazine, remembers thumbing the onion-skin pages of the Webster’s Second New International Dictionary his family kept on a stand in his home.
During university 20 years ago, he volunteered as a reader for the OED, scouring music magazines for examples of new musical terms. He’s not bragging, but the dictionary’s inclusion of “techno-” to define sub-genres of music? That was him.
Read the rest here.
Karen Seidman, “Chillax, English is Always Evolving” (Montreal Gazette, June 10, 2011)
Welcome to the world of lexicography, where the guy who will be speaking Saturday about the emergence of the hip-hop lexis looks more like a Yale preppy (he was) than DJ Master Funk.
That would be Ben Zimmer, executive producer of visualthesaurus.com and vocabulary.com, the former New York Times Magazine language columnist who took over from esteemed etymologist William Safire, a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary and chairman of the American Dialect Society’s New Words Committee.
Yes, in other words, a major geek.
Read the rest here.
Interview on the CBC Radio show “Q with Jian Ghomeshi” about how hip-hop slang gets in the dictionary. (June 8, 2011)
Q: The Podcast 2011-06-08
Canadian journalist Robert MacNeil reflects on his career at PBS, a feature chat with TV director James Burrows on the secret to making people laugh for so many years and Lexicographer Ben Zimmer on hip-hop’s influence on popular slang, plus Mio!
(MP3 download; interview begins 52 minutes into the podcast)
Interview on NPR’s Morning Edition about what makes Spelling Bee words so difficult to spell. (June 1, 2011)
The Scripps National Spelling Bee is under way outside Washington, D.C., and over the next few days, 275 kids from ages 8 to 15 will put their spelling skills to the test.
“These kids are spending sometimes a few hours a day going through word lists” to learn the most difficult words in English, linguist Ben Zimmer tells NPR’s Renee Montagne. “Very often, they are coming from immigrant families that really prize learning English as part of becoming assimilated into American culture. So, my hat’s off to all of these young spellers.”
(Show page, audio, transcript, related Word Routes column; see also UPI, Newser)
Carol Guensberg, “Spelling Not Always on the Mark Throughout History” (Scripps Howard News Service, May 27, 2011)
The young champion of next week’s Scripps National Spelling Bee will win acclaim, a $30,000 cash prize and goodies worth at least another $10,000. All 275 contestants in the May 31-June 2 event — much of it televised live on ESPN from National Harbor, Md. just outside Washington, D.C. — will gain recognition and at least a $100 gift card.
But for those motivated more by the cudgel than the carrot, we point out the sometimes-pricey consequences of misspelling…
Despite his soaring oratory, “Abraham Lincoln was not a very good speller, even with things he’d have to spell a lot,” adds linguist Ben Zimmer, a former editor of American dictionaries at Oxford University Press. “He had trouble spelling Fort Sumter,” the South Carolina site marking the Civil War’s opening volleys. “He kept spelling it with a ‘p’ in it.”
Perhaps it’s fitting that, on the Lincoln Memorial, the word “future” is inscribed as “euture” in the president’s second inauguration speech.
Zimmer now tracks such linguistic hits and misses as executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com. The website includes an interactive spelling bee that adjusts to the individual’s level. Current Scripps finalists Nicholas Rushlow and Tony Incorvati practice on it, he adds.
Read the whole article here.
Interview on WCBS Newsradio about Bob Dylan’s impact on the English language. (May 27, 2011)
(Show page, related Word Routes column)
The June 2011 issue of the journal American Anthropologist includes a “dialogic review” of the On Language column.
Pamela Paul, “Raising Children Is Heck” (New York Times Week in Review, May 22, 2011)
What could account for the fervent embrace [of “Go the F**k to Sleep”]? After all, swearing is hardly new — unprintable words now grace the titles of Broadway shows and hit songs. It is surprising that a swear word “can still have any kind of transgressive power at this point, but it does — in certain contexts,” said Ben Zimmer, a linguist. “Given our current middle class culture, with its emphasis on exposing your children to positive influences, the book feels subversive.”
Read the rest here.
Interview on WCBS Newsradio about the origins of the phrase “Arab spring.” (May 20, 2011)
(Show page, related Word Routes column)