Peter Granitz, “Farewell? Good Bye? Au Revoir?” (Blog of the Nation, from NPR’s Talk of the Nation).
Ben Zimmer could certainly advise anyone which word to use right now. And before him, William Safire would have, too.
Last Sunday The New York Times Magazine published the final “On Language” column. For three decades, it reminded readers of middle school teachers hammering home vocabulary words and sentence structure. And the words and phrases weren’t wily-nilly either — they were pegged to the news.
Read the rest here. (Related On Language column)
Johnson, the language blog of The Economist, discusses the suspension of The New York Times Magazine‘s On Language column.
When Safire died several years ago, the column was taken up by Ben Zimmer, who took on the serious and the silly in language with wit and verve undergirded by a vast amount of knowledge. This blog has often found reason to rely on him. Now the column is no more; the magazine’s new editor axed it, along with several other features. Every new editor has the right to a shake-up, but with no disrespect to those others, though, “On Language” was a long-lived and beloved institution, the only place in American journalism where language was given such prominence. Cutting it was a mistake.
Read the rest here. (Related On Language column)
Interview on “The Conversation” (KUOW Seattle) about how IBM’s Watson computer performed on Jeopardy! (Feb. 17, 2011)
Language, Humans, And Our Robot Overlords: Watson the computer crushed the human competition on “Jeopardy!” this week. How well did Watson’s language processor handle all the bad puns and double entendres in the Jeopardy clues? New York Times language columnist Ben Zimmer rates Watson’s performance.
(Show page, RealAudio, MP3, download, related Atlantic Monthly piece, Word Routes column. Segment begins about 11 minutes into the show.)
John Timpane, “A Linguistic Blizzard for All These Snowstorms” (Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 9, 2011).
Ben Zimmer is the “On Language” columnist for the New York Times Magazine and executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com websites. He writes by e-mail that words such as snowmageddon are portmanteau words, in which two words are joined cleverly together. In the case of weather words, “a weather term is playfully grafted with another word segment for purposes of emphasis or exaggeration.” He says snow talk can get “ludicrously melodramatic” when “snowstorms are likened to apocalyptic end times.” And he allows as how he’s feeling a little “snowmanteau fatigue.”
Read the rest here.