John Brandon “FWIW — The origins of ‘Net shorthand” (Computerworld, Nov. 7, 2008)
Ben Zimmer, an executive producer at the Visual Thesaurus and a former editor at the American Oxford Dictionary, said that BRB is one of the few terms still in wide use today that was listed on the Jargon File, circa 1990.
It states the abbreviation was reported as being used in proprietary commercial networks such as GEnie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) and CompuServe, which began in 1985 and 1979, respectively, before the World Wide Web became popular.
But wait, he also notes that textfiles.com shows the term in a May 1989 “FidoNews” newsletter.
And he points to even earlier usage by Apple developers on a Jan. 3, 1989, Apple II Development Forum Conference Log on textfiles.com. So it’s safe to assume it was used as early as 1988. …
Zimmer notes that the first usage of LOL appeared on the aforementioned “FidoNews” newsletter in 1989.
Read the rest here.
Kate Phillips, “West Wing Window Treatments” (The Caucus blog, The New York Times, Oct. 25, 2008)
We’ve often been struck by the cliche on the campaign trail, where a candidate bemoans an opponent who’s already “measuring the drapes” while en route to a bid for the White House or to another higher office….
So, when The Washington Post’s Richard Leiby tried to mine the origins of the phrase earlier this week, with a headline about a “moth-eaten metaphor,” ears and eyes perked up. Especially those of linguists across the country. Our very own Bill Safire, who doggedly pursues the new and noteworthy in political lingo, came up blank when asked by Mr. Leiby about this particular locution. Mr. Safire hadn’t investigated the worn phrase.
But it does date back beyond Mr. Leiby’s search. He ended it at 1980. Then Benjamin Zimmer, a member of the Executive Council of the American Dialect Society and the executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, took up the challenge.
Read the rest here.
Interview on Voice of America’s “Wordmaster” program about “mavericks,” “earmarks,” and “lipstick on a pig.” (Transcript, audio)
Interview on Voice of America’s “Wordmaster” program about “bailouts” and “golden parachutes.” (Transcript, audio)
Interview on Voice of America’s “Wordmaster” program about presidential campaign lingo. (Transcript, audio)
William Safire, “On Language: It Would Seem” (New York Times, Sept. 14, 2008)
When did the game [for game-changer] begin? I first tracked it to a logical source in sports. The Washington Post had a 1982 baseball reference: “Singleton hit his game-changer . . . fair by eight yards” and a decade later described football’s Desmond Howard as “a game-breaker and a game-changer.” But when I set that etymological Inspector Javert — Ben Zimmer of www.visualthesaurus.com — on the trail, he noted the adoption by business motivators of the sports metaphor, including a prescient 1995 reference in The Wall Street Journal to the Internet as “a real game-changer.” Casting a wider net, he came up with an origin beyond sport, in playing cards: The Atlanta Constitution’s “Bridge Forum” of June 29, 1930, frowned on attempts to improve the game of bridge: “Seldom are the game-changers idle.”
Read the rest here.
Jeremy Peters, “The Mayor Has a Word for Almost All Occasions” (New York Times, Apr. 29, 2008)
“It is a strong word and has a little bit of heft,” said Ben Zimmer, the editor of Visual Thesaurus, a Web site that charts synonyms and their relationships to one another. “So in terms of style, it might be better to use it less frequently.”
Read the rest here. (Related Word Routes column)
David Kamp, “Permalinks,” review of Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web (New York Times Book Review, Mar. 23, 2008)
I also liked being taken off the beaten path and into a blogger’s area of obsessive, esoteric interest. … In the case of the blogger Benjamin Zimmer, a linguistic anthropologist, it’s language that turns him on. News reports of the infamously lovelorn NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak inspired Zimmer to write a lengthy, multipost exegesis of singular-versus-plural approaches to the word “diaper,” as in “wearing a diaper” versus “wearing diapers.”
Read the rest here.
William Safire, “On Language: Bird-Dog Minute” (New York Times, Feb. 24, 2008)
The word [firewall] burned through the thin, dry-timbered wall of political neology in 1984, as Senator John Glenn’s campaign manager in South Carolina, John Lawson, told the A.P. that Glenn’s campaign “considered six Deep South states to be the crucial states for Glenn — the fire wall, if you will, between Mondale and the nomination.” Fritz Mondale won a majority of those states in Democratic races on his way to ultimate defeat in the general election by Ronald Reagan. “So much for the fire wall,” observes Ben Zimmer of Oxford University Press. “It worked about as well for Glenn in ’84 as Florida did this year for Giuliani and California for Romney.”
Read the rest here.