Interview on BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program about the claim that English was adding its millionth word. (Show page with audio)
Ben Zimmer in the News
Interview on Houston Public Radio about the supposed million-word milestone. (Transcript, streaming audio, download)
David Pescovitz, “Moist, and Other Words People Dislike” (BoingBoing, May 19, 2009).
Apparently, a lot of people hate the word “moist.” They also hate “hate,” “no,” “like,” and “impossible.” This, according to an essay by Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus.
Read the rest here.
Kristi L. Gustafson, “Words We Love, Words We Hate” (Albany Times Union, May 17, 2009).
So why, exactly, do we have an aversion to some words, while others make our tongues (and minds) happy?
“These reactions hinge on a combination of phonological and semantic factors,” says Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, a Web-based, interactive dictionary and thesaurus. “The word moist may trigger negative reactions, but not rhyming words like hoist or joist.”
Read the rest here. (Related Word Routes column)
Ron Charles, “1 Millions Words! But Who’s Counting?” (Washington Post Short Stack blog, Apr. 29, 2009)
Last night, I called Benjamin Zimmer to ask him about this elusive million-word milestone. Mr. Zimmer is executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. When I mentioned the subject of my call, I could hear his heart sink, the way your doctor sighs when you ask (again) about the health benefits of bull semen.
Read the rest here.
Jan Freeman, “The Word: Hello, Gobsmacked” (Boston Globe, Apr. 26, 2009).
SOME NEW WORDS are extroverts – they want to be noticed. Just look at gobsmacked, currently in the spotlight along with Susan Boyle, the singing phenom from “Britain’s Got Talent,” and her 100 million YouTube hits. When Boyle told reporters she was “gobsmacked” at her reception, Ben Zimmer noted last week in his column at Visual Thesaurus, lookups of the word spiked sharply on Google Trends.
Read the rest here.
William Safire, “On Language: I Don’t Do ‘Do’” (New York Times Magazine, Apr. 12, 2009).
I ran this speculation past Ben Zimmer of visualthesaurus.com, who replied: “I think your hunch is correct about the provenance of the ‘I don’t do X’ phrasal template. There must have been a major influence from the stereotypical maid’s stipulation, ‘I don’t do windows,’ which attained catchphrase status by the mid-1970s as a staple of sitcoms and cartoons.”
But does the ready acceptance of this “phrasal template” mean we are living in syntax, undermining the rules of order and word relationships in sentence structure on which we base our grammar? “An interesting syntactic aspect is that the complement of do, regardless of whether it’s a noun or adjective, can take on a highly abstract quality,” Zimmer said. “When Larry Summers said, ‘I don’t do ticktock,’ he was taking the journalistic sense of ‘ticktock’ and abstracting it into a mass noun for the disclosure of behind-the-scenes gossip.”
Read the rest here.
Joan Gralla, “Financial Woes Spawn Words Like ‘Chiconomic’” (Reuters, Mar. 26, 2009).
“Chiconomic” is a play on the newly cash-strapped style-conscious, joining similar terms such as “frugalista” and “recessionista,” according to Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, www.visualthesaurus.com.
Read the rest here.