Adam L. Penenberg, “Blogging as Multiplier Effect” (Publishers Weekly, Oct. 5, 2009). Interview with Rebecca Ford and Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press:
You’ve also had a few runaway blog hits that have served to effectively market Oxford University products.
Ford: Yes, in spring 2007, Andrew Smith, author of The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, posted about four fake culinary icons, and then called for a vote to nominate America’s best fake culinary icon. My vote, for example, was for Aunt Jemima. The post was picked up on all the big food blogs and readers poured in to share their opinion. As a result, we attracted a far wider audience of food lovers. In a similar vein, Ben Zimmer was able to promote our dictionaries program with a post about “long words,” which explained history, etymology, etc. Language bloggers reposted it across the Web, and a flurry of readers came to the blog to share the longest word they knew. In the process, they learned about Oxford’s dictionary program.
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com, said word mavens call these terms “minced oaths.” They fall into two categories, he said: “Alterations, where the euphemized version has a close phonetic similarity to the original curse word, and substitutions, where there is more of a decoupling.”
Lane Brown, “Mad Men Ruined” (New York Magazine Vulture blog, Aug. 26, 2009)
Has Matthew Weiner just given up altogether? Lexicographer Ben Zimmer noticed yesterday that on Sunday’s episode of Mad Men, sitting on a shelf behind Sterling Cooper’s CFO Lane Pryce was the three-volume edition of The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which, as everyone knows, was first published in 1987 — 24 years after the show’s current season supposedly takes place.
Fans of AMC’s Mad Men know that the set decorators are usually slavishly faithful to the look and style of the early ’60s. But Sunday’s episode contained a glaring (and uncharacteristic) anachronism, as my friend, the lexicographer Ben Zimmer, noted yesterday on his Word Routes blog.
Interview on American Public Media’s “Future Tense” about how the verb “fail” is being transformed into a noun, an interjection, and even an adjective. (Show page, audio)