Steven Yaccino, “Away With Words” (University of Chicago Magazine, May-June 2011)
Ben Zimmer, AM’98, took over William Safire’s On Language column before it was pulled earlier this year. Now where’s a word nerd to turn?
Read the profile here.
Ben Zimmer in the News
Emily Guendelsberger, “The Etymology of ‘Jawn’” (The Onion A.V. Club, Philadelphia edition, May 16, 2011)
Reading stories from Philly, our poor copy editors back at The A.V. Club’s Chicago mother ship have to deal with not only our constant profanity, but also our regional oddities—“cheesesteak” as one word instead of the usual two, references to the mysterious Wawa, and, most recently, one writer’s use of the even more mysterious “jawn.” We explained the word’s all-purpose “thing” definition as best as we could, but that got us wondering about how the word came to have this meaning in Philly, and only in Philly. We decided to call up linguist, lexicographer, and On Language columnist for The New York Times Ben Zimmer to ask him about “jawn,” “hoagie,” “down the Shore,” and other words in Philly’s regional lexicon.
Read the rest here.
Decision by Judge Richard Posner in “Bloomfield State Bank v. United States of America,” U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit. (May 11, 2011)
“Choate, a back-formation from inchoate, is a misbegotten word, for the prefix in inchoate is intensive and not negative․ The word derives from the Latin verb inchoare ‘to hitch with; to begin.’ Yet, because it was misunderstood as being a negative (meaning ‘incomplete’), someone invented a positive form for it, namely choate (meaning ‘complete’).” Bryan Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage 152 (2d ed.1995); see also Ben Zimmer, “On Language—Choate,” N.Y. Times, Jan. 3, 2010, p. MM16. The “in” in “inchoate” is no more a negative than the “in” in “incipient” or “into” or “ingress” or “inflammable.” Imagine thinking that because “inflammable” means “catches fire,” “flammable” must mean fireproof. “Inchoate” means vague, unformed, or undeveloped. If there were a word “choate,” it would mean approximately the same thing.
Read Judge Posner’s decision here (related On Language column here).
Interview on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show” about the controversy over using “Geronimo” as a codename in the bin Laden mission. (May 6, 2011)
(Show page, streaming audio, download, related Word Routes column)
Interview on the WBUR show “Here and Now” about the controversial use of “Geronimo” as a codeword in the Osama bin Laden raid. (May 5, 2011)
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, tells us how Geronimo made its way into military parlance and discusses why so many Native American terms pervade our culture, despite objections from American Indian groups.
(Show page, audio, related Word Routes column)
Joseph P. Kahn, “What Does ‘Friend’ Mean Now?” (Boston Globe, May 5, 2011)
One expert who doesn’t seem overly troubled by how “friend’’ keeps changing is linguist and language columnist Ben Zimmer. Because words are endlessly flexible, Zimmer says, we shouldn’t expect them to remain immutable but to be used in various ways for various purposes over time.
“People worry that this dilution is impacting (its meaning),’’ says Zimmer. “I see it as the inherent flexibility of language taking on new guises over time.’’
Society often focuses on these semantic shifts, he adds, as a way to complain about larger social phenomena, such as being disconnected geographically — and emotionally — from one’s family and childhood roots. “Words become proxies for anxieties,’’ he says, “in this case anxiety about connections to people’’ in the Facebook age.
Read the rest here.
Interview on WCBS Newsradio on new “green lingo” for Earth Day. (Apr. 22, 2011)
(Show page, related Word Routes column)
Interview on WCBS Newsradio about the controversy over words in the new English translation of the Catholic liturgy. (Apr. 15, 2011)
(Show page, related Word Routes column)
Interview on BrianLehrer.tv (broadcast on CUNY TV) about how tech companies co-opting common words. (Apr. 13, 2011)
(Show page, video, related Week in Review article)
Interview on WNYC’s “The Takeaway,” quizzing the hosts on their knowledge of American vocabulary. (Apr. 13, 2011)
Ben Zimmer, Executive Producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com is putting John and Celeste to the test by asking them to identify the real definition of words with truly American origins. Could you identify absquatulate, callithump and copacetic?