“For too long, vocabulary instruction has been tied to inefficient and tedious methods of the past — rote memorization, flashcards, and dry word lists with no context,” said Ben Zimmer, executive producer of Vocabulary.com. “We’ve started from scratch to create a system that models each person’s vocabulary and abilities so that we can serve up a personalized learning experience that is both engaging and effective.”
Interview on “The Conversation” with Ross Reynolds (KUOW Seattle) about new words that people love and hate. (Apr. 4, 2011)
Hang around the proverbial office water cooler these days and you hear words like ‘ginormous’ or ‘chillax.’ What new words do you love? What words do you hate? And what’s the dividing line between slang and conventional English in 2011? Does someone need to call the language police? We’ll take your phone calls and talk about words with language guru Ben Zimmer.
“Slanguage,” back-page essay in the New York Times Book Review on the latest in slang dictionaries. (Apr. 3, 2011)
Back in 1937, when Eric Partridge’s groundbreaking “Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English” was first published, The New York Times Book Review ran a glowing notice. “The lost words of the language have finally come to roost,” it began. “The unmentionables are mentioned and carefully placed in proper alphabetical form.”
Now, nearly 75 years later, can a slang dictionary possibly hope to uncover any “lost words”? Are there any unmentionables left to mention?
Interviewed by New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus about slang dictionaries for the weekly Books podcast. (Apr. 1, 2011)
This week: A special conversation with Henry Kissinger about Otto von Bismarck; the linguist Ben Zimmer on a new dictionary of slang; Julie Bosman has notes from the field; and Jennifer Schuessler has best-seller news.
In this week’s Book Review, I consider the most recent — and most ambitious — effort to compile a dictionary of English-language slang. But such efforts have been underway for centuries. Several months ago, Oxford University’s Bodleian Library republished the earliest known foray: “The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699,” with an introduction by John Simpson, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
At its annual meeting last January, the American Dialect Society named a new chair of its New Words Committee: Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, and until recently the On Language columnist for The New York Times Magazine. As part of his duties, Zimmer will take the helm of “Among the New Words,” a long-running department in American Speech, the quarterly journal of the ADS published by Duke University Press. Zimmer will also oversee the selection of the ADS Word of the Year, an announcement that attracts extensive media attention. Here Zimmer reflects on his new role.
“App” is a really old term. Like 1980s-old. Ben Zimmer, chairman of the new words committee for the American Dialect Society, which chose “app” of its word of the year in 2010, says he found a reference to computer apps that dates to 1985.
” ‘Killer apps’ back in the old days could refer to a spreadsheet program — that would be the app that would really drive people to buy some software,” he said.