Interview on NPR’s Morning Edition about the perils of smartphone autocorrect. (Mar. 22, 2011)
Linguist Ben Zimmer says that the history of automatic spellcheckers goes back to Microsoft Word and other word processors, but the technology for smartphones differs from those because it tries to understand what the user means based on both the proximity of the letters to each other on that tiny little virtual keyboard and on completing a word based on what it thinks you meant.
So if you’re trying to tell a friend about a great double play by “Derek Jeter,” don’t be surprised if your phone turns that into “Derek heterosexual.” Because the phone’s dictionary might not recognize Jeter, it turns the J to a close letter on the keyboard – H — and completes the new word, “heter,” that it’s now created.
The linguist Ben Zimmer said he thought the growing popularity of the service as a creative outlet could be ascribed to the same “impulse that goes into writing a sonnet, of accepting those kind of limits.” But he admitted that his favorite Twitter literature in recent weeks has not been exactly Shakespearean: the wildly profane and popular Twitter musings that purported to be by the Chicago mayor-elect, Rahm Emanuel, but whose real author was recently revealed to be the rock journalist Dan Sinker.
“The deeper you got into it,” Mr. Zimmer said, “the more novelistic it became, and it was really compelling. It’s almost impossible to see it working in a traditional novel format. But as a Twitter creation it was hilarious, and worth every word.”
Interview on NPR’s Morning Edition about the history of the word “tsunami.” (Mar. 18, 2011)
The word “tsunami” is originally a Japanese word, but today it’s commonly used in English. And it’s been all over the news since a powerful earthquake sent a wall of water into northeastern Japan on March 11.
The first English use of the word happened more than 100 years ago, says linguist Ben Zimmer, of the Visual Thesaurus. That’s when an earthquake struck off the east coast of Japan, very close to where the recent tsunami hit.
Glen M. Martin, “The Dislike Button” (New York Times Letter to the Editor, Mar. 13, 2011)
Finally, and perhaps most troubling for a high-school English teacher and lover of language, was Ben Zimmer’s announcement that this would be his final On Language column. Zimmer performed admirably in the unenviable task of replacing William Safire. In this time of rapid changes in the development of language — the redefinition of what is acceptable, the spectrum of global influences and so on — a column like this is essential.
Ben Zimmer, executive producer at the Visual Thesaurus, was looking into Sheenisms when I caught up with him, having just coined Sheenenfreude to describe the fascination with the actor’s ravings. Zimmer chairs the New Words Committee for the American Dialect Society, whose members vote for the best word, new or old, every fall. In 2009, the members picked “tweet,” and in 2008, “bailout” stole the show. For 2010, they chose “app,” a word that had been around for quite a while but needed a boost from Apple to capture society’s attention.
Has language, and the veracity of language, become irrelevant in the modern technological age? It might be a bit of a leap to make too much out of the decision to end the run of the “On Language” column that appeared every Sunday in The New York Times Magazine, a column started in 1979 by legendary political reporter William Safire. But as the use of language, and grammatical standards, become looser and slang becomes more widely accepted, could the end of an iconic column examining language be a sign of the times? Ben Zimmer, the columnist who took over “On Language” from Safire, wonders about the future of language when “every aspect of our linguistic life is open to technologization of one form or another” and “our growing expectations that computer interfaces should be able to recognize our speech and text, understand it and talk back to us.” We look back on the 31 years of “On Language” and look forward to the future human communication.
Deb Amlen, “The Only Constant” (Wordplay, the crossword blog of The New York Times, Mar. 4, 2011).
For those of us who toil and revel in the world of words, it started with the end of Ben Zimmer’s column, “On Language.”
Ben is a colleague of mine, and a more-than-worthy successor to William Safire, the column’s mainstay since 1979. To be frank, it hurt to lose a column that provoked so much conversation among word lovers and students of etymology. Online discussion groups and social media outlets blazed with palpable outrage.
I met with now-former New York Times “On Language” magazine columnist Ben Zimmer one afternoon at a coffee shop in SoHo to discuss the contemporary onslaught of perceived randomness. He is the executive producer of two language-related websites, a consultant for the OED, a graduate of linguistics from Yale, a member of the American Dialect Society and the Dictionary Society of North America, and is not a nerd, but a gentleman.
Zimmer describes the word random as a defuser of social tension, a kind of “all-purpose label” for anything out of the norm.