Interview on Voice of America’s “Wordmaster” program about new economic words spawned by the recession. (Transcript, audio)
Ben Zimmer in the News
Interview on “At Issue with Ben Merens” (Wisconsin Public Radio) about new economic words spawned by the recession. (Show page, streaming audio, download)
Interview on NPR’s Morning Edition about the expression “doing more with less.” (Transcript, audio)
William Safire, “On Language: Hard Times” (New York Times Magazine, Feb. 22, 2009).
I passed that clue on to Ben Zimmer, executive producer of www.visualthesaurus.com and a longtime capo of the Phrasedick Brigade, with the suggestion that it may have to do with the populist President Andrew Jackson’s assault on Philadelphia’s Second Bank of the United States. Jackson liked “hard” money — silver and gold, money you could bite, none of that soft, paper stuff being printed by private banks — and was furious at the way rich merchants controlled much of the nation’s money supply. As he turned the White House over to his vice president and acolyte, Martin Van Buren, the bottom fell out of the economy, inflation raged and the first Great Depression lasted five years.
“The financial crisis of 1837 was indeed a high-water mark for hard times usage,” Zimmer reports. “I checked Gale’s 19th Century U.S. newspapers database, and there are a whopping 375 articles from 1837 mentioning ‘hard times,’ 50 of them using the phrase in the headline of the article.” (Times may change, but headline writers never let go of a short grabber.) “The Washington Globe reported on April 29, 1837, ‘Every paper we open contains some lamentable account of the pressure in the money market, and loud cries of hard times.’ That’s when the Panic of 1837 began in earnest. In May, banks suspended the payment of hard money, and small change disappeared from circulation, leading to the production of ‘Hard Times’ tokens.” (That accounts for the NOT ONE CENT on my token, to distinguish a coin issued by a private bank from a government-issued cent.)
While he was at it — Netymologists are compulsive diggers — Zimmer provided a citation in the Early English Books Online database from a 1598 poem, “The Complaint of Poetry for the Death of Liberality,” by Richard Barnfield. Its plaintive question is echoed these days by journalists induced to take buyouts as well as literary lights dimmed by darkling publishers: “But who can live with words, in these hard times?”
Read the rest here.
William Safire, “On Language: Haircut” (New York Times, Jan. 11, 2009)
J. Sinclair Armstrong, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, told the Dallas Security Dealers Association on Nov. 1, 1955, about rules to “provide more stringent standards in valuing the broker’s assets. . . . These are the so-called ‘haircut’ provisions” that sought a 30 percent deduction from the market value of stocks in computing the broker’s net capital. Armstrong used the colorful term in subsequent Congressional testimony, but always with “so-called,” a dignity-conscious person’s way of dissociating himself from bean-counter slang.
Discovery of this early usage was provided us by the netymologist Ben Zimmer, executive producer at the lively Visual Thesaurus Web site (www.visualthesaurus.com).
(I thought I just coined netymologist, combining net and etymologist, to mean “one deft at using the Internet to track the origin of words and phrases.” But when I Googled the word to make sure no other great mind was thinking alike — drat! — up popped a previous usage by a communications-design group named M2 urging, “If you think you’ve got what it takes to be a Netymologist, contact us.” When it comes to coinage-claiming, the increasingly omniscient Web won’t let you get away with a thing.)
Read the rest here.
Motoko Rich, “Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books” (New York Times, Jan. 5, 2009).
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of a Web site and software package called the Visual Thesaurus, was seeking the earliest use of the phrase “you’re not the boss of me.” Using a newspaper database, he had found a reference from 1953.
But while using Google’s book search recently, he found the phrase in a short story contained in “The Church,” a periodical published in 1883 and scanned from the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
Ever since Google began scanning printed books four years ago, scholars and others with specialized interests have been able to tap a trove of information that had been locked away on the dusty shelves of libraries and in antiquarian bookstores. …
Google’s book search “allows you to look for things that would be very difficult to search for otherwise,” said Mr. Zimmer, whose site is visualthesaurus.com.
Read the rest here.
EatFeed podcast, Amuse-Bouche 16: “Locavores & a Lexicon of Revolutionary Eaters” (Jan. 1, 2009)
Ben Zimmer of Oxford Univ Press talks about a century of new food words and the social revolutions that spawned them.
Listen to the podcast here.
Interview on “At Issue with Ben Merens” (Wisconsin Public Radio) about the top words of 2008. (Show page, streaming audio, download)
Colleen Mastony, “Blagojeviching” (Chicago Tribune, Dec. 14, 2008)
Ben Zimmer, a lexicographer, said use of “Blagojeviched” is unlikely to spread beyond Illinois. “It’s simply too hard to say,” Zimmer said. In Chicago, however, we might just have a new term in our political vocabulary. One local blogger last week used the B-word three times in one sentence, writing: “I’m so blagojeviching blagojevich about Blagojevich.”
Read the rest here. (Related Word Routes column)