In 1828, The United States Telegraph, a newspaper supporting President Andrew Jackson, despite vilification in his re-election campaign for having married Rachel Robards before her divorce was complete, denounced its rival’s coverage with “The Intelligencer at its dirty tricks again!” (Cummins credits Ben Zimmer, an editor at the Oxford University Press, for this research; Zimmer is a source of mine on phrasedickery too.)
When editors at the New Oxford American Dictionary recently announced that their word of the year was “locavore,” which means someone who eats locally grown food, they also became the very definition of publicity.
In the last few weeks Ben Zimmer, an Oxford University Press dictionary editor, appeared on numerous radio shows and on a syndicated public radio program to talk about the word contest. The selection of locavore also had 25 mentions in major newspapers like The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post.
“With most words you expect to have some change in semantics,” says Ben Zimmer, the editor for Oxford University Press’s American dictionaries. “This one has stayed surprisingly similar to its pejorative roots.”
William Safire, “On Language: Vogue Words” (New York Times, Mar. 11, 2007)
“Go figure it out,” Robert Stack sighed, one Erskine Johnson reported in a column that appeared in The Walla Walla Union Bulletin on June 10, 1953. “After ‘The Bullfighter and the Lady,’ which was a great prestige picture, I didn’t work for a year. ‘Bwana Devil,’ panned by everybody in Hollywood, did the trick for me.”
Benjamin Zimmer, editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press, passed that citation around the American Dialect Society more than two years ago. He informs me that “‘go figure’ seems to have originated as a shorter form of such expressions as ‘go figure it out’ and ‘you go figure it,’ both of which date to the 1950s.” Then shortening took place, and by the 1970s we had go figure. Now that phrase is rampant.