September 6, 2013
Interview on KUOW’s “The Record” about the expression “having your cake and eat it too.” (Sept. 6, 2013)
You can’t have your cake and eat it too, but how are you supposed to eat cake you don’t have? Language guru Ben Zimmer is back today and he explains the whole having, eating and not having cake thing. And what that has to do with how the Unabomber was captured. Really.
(Show page, related On Language column)
Interview with KUOW’s “The Record” about the origins of the expression “the whole nine yards.” (Sept. 5, 2013)
Did you know that the phrase “the whole 9 yards” used to be “the whole 6 yards?” It’s true. And cloud nine, that fantastic place to be, used to be cloud seven, then cloud eight. So how did we get to nine yards and cloud nine? Ben Zimmer is back today to talk about phrase inflation as we consider our series on strange language.
(Show page, related Word Routes column)
September 4, 2013
Mike Vuolo, “Here Come the Word Nerds! Introducing Slate’s Language Blog, Lexicon Valley” (Slate, Sept. 4, 2013)
Why do English speakers often begin sentences with a dangling, superfluous so? What makes the “historical present” such an effective storytelling tense? Is Bob Garfield a stone-cold misogynist because he finds “vocal fry” insufferable?
These are just a few of the questions we’ve tackled on the podcast Lexicon Valley over the past year and a half, and we’re deeply grateful to the many listeners who have tuned in. But many of you have written to request language-related content that can be consumed without headphones, which, alas, remain taboo in many workplaces (where shirking with the eyes is easier to do on the DL).
And so, until surgically implanted “in-ear” speakers (Exhibit A) are standard-issue, we bring you Lexicon Valley: The Blog. We’ve teamed up with the brilliant linguists at Language Log—including the University of Pennsylvania’s Mark Liberman, the University of Edinburgh’s Geoffrey Pullum, and Vocabulary.com’s Ben Zimmer—whose new and archival posts will be featured here along with content from other contributors.
Read the rest here.
September 4, 2013
Interview on KUOW’s “The Record” about the origins of the expression “pipe dream.” (Sept. 4, 2013)
Yesterday we heard some history on the term “doping” in sports and today, language columnist Ben Zimmer explains where the term “pipe dream” comes from.
The origin of “pipe dream” has to do with opium smoking and dates back to the 18th and 19th centuries. The dream-like visions or flights of fancy known to occur under the influence of opium came to be called “pipe dreams,” referring to the opium pipe.
The expression took off in late 19th century in American English in cities where opium dens were appearing, especially Chicago. Chicago newspapers began using the term more generally to mean something unrealistic or fantastic; something you hope for but don’t think would actually occur.
Expressions that come out of modern drug use can become so common that we can use them without evoking the images of drug use.
(Show page, related Word Routes column)
September 4, 2013
Katy Steinmetz, “What Twitter Says to Linguists” (Time, Sept. 9, 2013)
There’s more in a tweet than 140 characters. Among the 500 million messages sent each day on Twitter, there’s a tsunami of slang terms and textspeak. There are hashtags, emoticons and links. Many tweets contain geotags that identify where on earth a person stood when pressing send. That may sound like just a lot of noise, but for linguists making ever more sophisticated use of it all, Twitter is providing the most enormous stream of data they have ever had at their disposal.
Gone are the days when a language researcher had to interview subjects in a lab or go door to door in the hope of gaining a few insights about a limited sample of people. Academics in the U.S. and Europe are using the seven-year-old microblogging platform to put millions of examples under the microscope in an instant. “It’s unprecedented,” says sociolinguist Ben Zimmer, “the sheer amount of text you can look at at one time, and the number of people you can analyze at once.” Hidden in tweets are insights about how we portray our identity in a few short sentences. There are clues to long-standing mysteries, like how slang spreads. And there is a new form of communication to study. If language is the archive of history, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, social media should get its own shelf.
Read the rest here.
Interview on KUOW’s “The Record” about the origins of “dope” and “doping.” (Sept. 3, 2013)
We’ve seen lots of sports scandals in the news over the years that have to do with performance-enhancing drugs, commonly referred to as doping. Dope, from the Dutch word doop, is actually a gravy or a sauce, so how did we go from gravy to drugs? Lexicographer Ben Zimmer gives KUOW’s Ross Reynolds the straight dope on dope.
(Show page, related Wall St. Journal column, Word Routes column)
Interview on WGN Radio’s “The Brian Noonan Show” on the hubbub over “twerk” and other words being added to Oxford Dictionaries. (Sept. 1, 2013)
(Show page, related Language Log post)
August 28, 2013
Katy Steinmetz, “Media Makes the Manning Switch” (Time Swampland blog, Aug. 28, 2013)
The prospect of a person living life as a him and then a her is still confusing for many Americans: A 2011 survey found that 3 in 10 do not know what it means to be transgender. And the idea that biological sex is divorced from culturally constructed gender—that there is something more fluid than a sex listed on a birth certificate—is not an easy one for many people.
“Identities that subvert those binaries make us uncomfortable,” said sociolinguist Ben Zimmer, executive producer at Vocabulary.com.
Pronouns can be political hot buttons, the same way marriage and husband and wife have been for those taking opposing sides when it comes to gay rights.
“Pronouns are personal,” Zimmer said. “They’re the most personal parts of speech.”
Read the rest here. (Related Language Log column)
Interview on WNYC’s “The Leonard Lopate Show” about the literary origins of the financial term “bubble.” (Aug. 27, 2013)
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of Vocabulary.com and the Visual Thesaurus, and language columnist for The Wall Street Journal, discusses the use of the word “bubble” in the financial sense.
(Show page, streaming audio, download, related Wall Street Journal column, Word Routes column)
August 24, 2013
The Bubble for ‘Bubble’ Knows No End
Wall Street Journal, Aug. 24, 2013 (PDF)
President Obama has gone on an anti-bubble offensive. In a series of speeches earlier this month, Obama warned of duplicating policies that led to the housing bubble and its inevitable burst. He said he wants a Fed chairman who “makes sure that we’re not seeing artificial bubbles in place,” and the next day he spoke of the need to “turn the page on the bubble-and-bust mentality.”
Jeremiads against financial “bubbles”—speculative schemes that inflate equity prices before a sudden selloff—have been commonplace for nearly three centuries. The “bubble” metaphor is often attributed to Jonathan Swift, who wrote a poem in December 1720 about the South Sea Bubble, which ruined British investors in the South Sea Company: “The nation then too late will find,/ Computing all their cost and trouble,/ Directors’ promises but wind,/ South Sea at best a mighty bubble.”
A stroll through historical newspaper databases, however, reveals that complaints about “bubbles” filled London journals for a year before Swift penned his verse. The South Sea Company, which had been granted a monopoly on commerce with Spain’s South American colonies, wasn’t the only source of bubble-bursting. Months earlier, the French economy had been thrown into chaos by the Mississippi Scheme of Scottish economist John Law, who had become France’s controller-general of finances.
On Dec. 12, 1719, Nathaniel Mist’s Weekly Journal published a letter from a correspondent calling himself “Anti Bubble.” After satirizing financial intrigues as “new and old bubble,” and even “hubble bubble,” he inquires, “Now, good Mr. Journalist, tell us, since Bubbles are so much in Fashion, what Bubble will come upon the Stage next? And how must an honest Man do among them all, that he may not be bubbled out of his Money?”
Who was the mysterious “Anti Bubble”? All signs point to Swift’s literary colleague Daniel Defoe, who wrote for Mist’s newspaper under various pen names. Ross B. Emmett, a professor of political economy at Michigan State University and compiler of the three-volume work, “Great Bubbles,” told me that Defoe’s weekly contributions were “full of concocted stories” about entrepreneurs manipulating the stock market based on false pretenses. But soon Defoe’s “bubble” talk came to be applied to the real-life schemes of the Mississippi and South Sea trading companies.
It helped that “bubble” was in use as a verb meaning “to cheat.” For investors bamboozled by promises of great wealth, the noun “bubble” was a perfect fit. As Charles Mackay wrote in his 1841 classic, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” the “bubble” nickname was “the most appropriate that imagination could devise.” And we can evidently thank Defoe’s imagination for devising it.
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