Ben Zimmer's latest interviews and other media appearances.
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Washington Post, “Too Many Women Ignore Their Own Misogyny”

June 3, 2014

Esther Cepeda, “Too Many Women Ignore Their Own Misogyny” (Washington Post, June 3, 2014)

Citing Merriam-Webster lexicographers who noticed their online dictionary searches for the word “misogyny” skyrocketed in the wake of the mass killing in Isla Vista, Calif., The Wall Street Journal’s language columnist Ben Zimmer recently wondered if it’s time to redefine the word “misogynist.”

After the rampage, Zimmer noted, opinionators rushed to dissect the usage and nature of misogyny. While some dictionaries consider the word to accurately mean “dislike of” or “prejudice against” women, Merriam-Webster defines “misogyny” as “a hatred of women” and editors there said “hatred” is “broad enough to encompass everything from feelings of dislike to entrenched prejudice and hostility.”

Read the rest here.

Voice of America, “‘Man Up’ has Long Been Part of the American Vernacular”

May 28, 2014

Matthew Hilburn, “‘Man Up’ has Long Been Part of the American Vernacular” (Voice of America, May 28, 2014)

When U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden should “man up and come back to the United States,” he was using language that has long been a part of manly American vernacular.

From sports to politics, the term “man up” has been more than tossed around the locker room.

The term originally was a way to express the verb “to man” – as in to man the factory with enough manpower, according to a New York Times article on the history of the phrase written by language expert Ben Zimmer.

Today, though, the term has sometimes evolved into one more suited to backroom politics or the sports field rather than in the august halls of diplomacy.

According to Zimmer’s explanation to the Times, it is an exhortation used to mean: “Don’t be a sissy. Toughen up” or “Do the right thing; be a mensch, a Yiddish term for an honorable or upright person.”

Zimmer traces the steady rise in use of the term in advertising pointed at men.

Read the rest here.

Washington Post, “‘Man Up’: John Kerry Adopts the Battle Cry of the Politically Powerless”

May 28, 2014

Philip Bump, “‘Man Up’: John Kerry Adopts the Battle Cry of the Politically Powerless” (Washington Post, The Fix, May 28, 2014)

In 2010, after a series of uses of the term by political candidates, language expert Ben Zimmer wrote about the phrase’s history as a rhetorical tool. He was reacting to, among other incidents, Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s demand that Sen. Harry Reid “man up,” and Sarah Palin’s insistence that the Republican Party “man up” and back tea party candidates. Zimmer also pointed to this exhaustive list compiled in October 2010 outlining more than a dozen uses of the phrase prior to that point.

Read the rest here.

‘Dog Whistles’ Only Some Voters Hear

May 24, 2014

‘Dog Whistles’ Only Some Voters Hear
Wall Street Journal, May 24, 2014

One of the more contentious passages in former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner‘s new memoir, “Stress Test,” describes a 2011 meeting that Mr. Geithner had with White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, preparing for appearances on the Sunday talk shows.

Mr. Geithner recalls that Mr. Pfeiffer asked him to say that “Social Security didn’t contribute to the deficit.” “Pfeiffer said the line was a ‘dog whistle’ to the left, a phrase I had never heard before,” he writes. “He had to explain that the phrase was code to the Democratic base, signaling that we intended to protect Social Security.”

Given his extensive experience in Washington, it’s surprising that Mr. Geithner had never come across the expression “dog whistle.” As a term for coded language that is only understood by one’s own supporters, it has been a popular metaphor in American politics for decades.

Actual dog whistles have been around since the 19th century. The English polymathFrancis Galton is credited with inventing a high-pitched whistle for testing the auditory ranges of dogs and other animals back in 1876. Another English inventor, Archibald Low,described in 1933 how to “make a whistle that cannot be heard by human beings, but to which a dog answers readily.” And by 1940, Purina was selling ultrasonic dog whistles.

Several decades later, the “dog whistle” turned into a figure of speech for subtle messages that not everyone could discern. Lexicographer Grant Barrett traces the usage back to a 1988 article by Washington Post pollster Richard Morin, in which he described the “dog whistle effect” in opinion polling: “Respondents hear something in the question that researchers do not.”

After Newt Gingrich engineered the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994, Rep. Christopher Cox told the New Republic that Mr. Gingrich’s plan of action worked “like a dog whistle,” and “if you were tuned into that frequency it made a lot of sense.” But it was a few years later in Australia that the expression truly got political, with the Labor Party accusing Conservative Prime Minister John Howard of indulging in “dog-whistle politics” in his policies on immigration and other hot-button issues.

In the U.S., critics have painted right-wing rhetoric on immigration as indulging in racial code words intended for the conservative base. In his recent book “Dog Whistle Politics,”Ian Haney López, law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that Republicans have engaged in such “racial dog whistling,” especially after 9/11. While the Obama administration might have a different set of dog whistles, as Mr. Geithner learned, discreet signals to slices of the electorate continue to be sent out in carefully packaged language.

Slate, “Happy 25th Birthday to LOL”

May 23, 2014

Gretchen McCulloch “Happy 25th Birthday to LOL” (Slate, May 23, 2014)

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the first known usage of LOL for “laughing out loud” (the “lots of love” interpretation, incidentally, is quite a bit older). The linguist Ben Zimmer notes that the earliest citation is from the May 1989 issue of a newsletter called Fidonet and is still available online, in all its ASCII’d glory.

Read the rest here.

The Atlantic, “So Long, Partner”

May 21, 2014

Jen Doll, “So Long, Partner” (The Atlantic, May 21, 2014)

Spouse, one of the most constant terms, has been used since about 1200. But it has never seriously challenged the primacy of husband or wife… “I don’t hear people using it in an offhand way,” says Ben Zimmer, the executive producer of Vocabulary.com, “unless they’re being funny about it—like ‘the plural of spouse is spice.’ ” …

Even as we come up with creative new phrasings for other facets of modern life, Zimmer predicts that husband and wife will continue to see plenty of use. “There’s a certain kind of comfort with those terms,” he explains. Maybe the simple fact is that we prefer to rely on the words with which we’re most comfortable to describe the paragons, fellows, and half-marrows with whom we feel most comfortable.

Read the rest here.

Here and Now (WBUR), “Is It Acceptable To Suffer From Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome?”

May 20, 2014

Here and Now (WBUR), “Is It Acceptable To Suffer From Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome?” (May 20, 2014)

On yesterday’s Here & Now, host Jeremy Hobson talked about credit card fraud and said both “ATM machine” and “PIN number.” Listeners took him to task for his redundant language, since the M in ATM already stands for “machine” and the N in PIN stands for “number.”

Today, Hobson apologizes for his redundancy and turns to linguist Ben Zimmer to find out whether his verbal faux pas is linguistically acceptable. Turns out there’s a term for it: RAS syndrome. It’s short for “redundant acronym syndrome syndrome.”

(Show page)

HuffPost Live, “How Short Is The Shelf-Life Of The #Hashtag?”

May 13, 2014

Appearance on HuffPost Live, “How Short Is The Shelf-Life Of The #Hashtag?” (May 13, 2014)

#Blessed is now one of the most popular trends on our Twitter feeds, but how has the word taken on a new meaning? HuffPost Live talks to charters of our language to see how Twitter is changing the way we use language.

(Show page, related article)

Boston Globe, “What ‘Mom’ Really Means in America”

May 11, 2014

Britt Peterson, “What ‘Mom’ Really Means in America” (Boston Globe, May 11, 2014)

“Mom” and “mommy” began appearing in the mid 19th century, part of a slew of variations, including mam, mum, and marm, that pop up in dialect and casual written language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of American Regional English. “Marm” would’ve usually been pronounced without the “r,” said Ben Zimmer, linguist and producer of Visual Thesaurus—and a former writer of this column—meaning that “Little Women”’s Marmee was probably an early namesake of today’s mommies.

Read the rest here.

Slate, “Hashtags Are the New Scare Quotes”

May 6, 2014

Katy Waldman, “Hashtags Are the New Scare Quotes” (Slate, May 6, 2014)

A lot of these migrations between the worlds of structure and voice relate to written language’s lack of nonverbal cues, says linguist Ben Zimmer. “Hashtags, or phrases like LOL, do for Twitter what gestures, facial expressions, or tone would do in face-to-face conversation,” he explained, which is “create a meta-commentary on the main message.”

Read the rest here.

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