Ben Zimmer

Richard Sandomir, “Things Are Going Zimmo” (Bats blog, New York Times, Feb. 14, 2013)

Ben Zimmer, the language columnist for The Boston Globe — he has never been called Zimmo to his face — said in an e-mail that Wednesday’s bit of Fred Speak “strikes me as a playful ad hoc formation, possibly influenced by such cartoonish words as ‘whammo’ and ‘blammo,’ onomatopoetically suggesting an explosion.”

He noted that some early 20th-century sportswriters called the infielder Heinie Zimmerman, Zimmo. But it would seem farfetched for Wilpon to have been thinking about a former New York Giant and Chicago Cub who played from 1907 to 1919.

A Mets spokesman declined to respond to a request to learn more about Wilpon’s seemingly impromptu word formation.

Zimmer wondered if two other words — zoom and boom — helped fuel Wilpon’s use of zimmo.

“They would be appropriate sound effects for a rapidly growing real estate market,” Zimmer said.

Read the rest here.

Emily Elert, “The State of The Guardian’s SOTU Infographic Is…Dumber” (Popular Science, Feb. 13, 2013)

In reality, the Flesch-Kincaid readability test measures two things: the length of the words in a piece of prose, and the number of words per sentence. As columnist and linguist Ben Zimmer explains, the test was developed in the 1970s, not as a metric for the intelligence, complexity, or lingual eloquence contained in a text, but as a “rough and ready analytical tool” for assessing the appropriateness of texts for different grade levels. If a book or article or written speech scores a 5, a fifth-grader should be able to get through it without getting lost in a sea of clauses and semicolons. […]

Okay, so word length has decreased slightly over time, and sentence length has decreased dramatically. That trend may denote a stylistic shift in political rhetoric, says Zimmer, but it tells you very little about the quality or intellectual prowess of each sentence’s content. Instead, it probably reflects the fact that politicians have caught on to the idea that audiences don’t really want to walk away from a speech in awe of the orator’s masterful use of the semi-colon; they want to walk away knowing what the orator was talking about.

Read the rest here.

Alyssa Bereznak, “An Oral History of YOLO, the Word That Lived Too Long” (Vanity Fair, Feb. 5, 2013)

On the most recent episode of Saturday Night Live, the Lonely Island crew partnered with host Adam Levine and musical guest Kendrick Lamar to parody the past year’s most popular and most hated word: YOLO. Andy Samburg declared the saying, short for “you only live once,” to be “the battle cry of a generation,” only to turn its original meaning on its head and offer “you oughta look out” as an alternative. It was a rare amusing mutation of the phrase, and the YouTube video became an instant hit, racking up more than 20 million views.

Yet YOLO’s poor performance in 2012’s Word of the Year competitions signals that its time as an “It word” has come and gone. As Ben Zimmer, a word scholar who served on the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year panel, puts it: “Even among the folks who were sort of language scholars and language observers, they had already gotten sick of YOLO too.” Within the span of a year, it has gone from catchy new slang to a “dangerous” youth motto, to a sarcastic Twitter hashtag, to the name of a new African cell phone. The world’s lexicographers have spoken: it is time we put the poor old colloquialism to rest, once and for all.

Read the rest here. (Related Boston Globe column, Word Routes column)

Maura Johnston, “Thanks To Will Smith, The World Has Been Gettin’ Jiggy For 15 Years” (Popdust, Jan. 29, 2013)

“I have to admit “(getting) jiggy” had pretty much fallen off my radar,” said Boston Globe language columnist and Visual Thesaurus executive producer Ben Zimmer. “At the time of the song’s popularity, it seemed destined for immediate obsolescence, like so much pop-culture slang. (In fact, it was in the running for ‘Least Likely to Succeed’ in the American Dialect Society’s 1998 Word of the Year voting.) When the OED saw fit to include it in a 2004 update, they gave the definition for the relevant sense of ‘jiggy’ as ‘excitedly energetic or uninhibited, often in a sexual manner,’ with ‘to get jiggy’ coming to mean “‘to engage in sexual activity.’

“I was surprised to see that the sexual sense is still quite common, at least in UK tabloids,” said Zimmer. The Sun used the phrase twice on the same day last week—once in a listicle counting down notable instances of public sex and once in a gossip item about Kim Kardashian; the UK version of the free paper Metro deployed it when talking about Beyoncé and Jay-Z; and The Sun (again!) used it in a story about people having sex at work.

“These are all uses of ‘get jiggy’ or ‘get jiggy with (someone),’ Zimmer noted. “When it’s used in the form ‘get jiggy with it’ (more consciously recalling the song), then the meaning tends to be ‘dance uninhibitedly’ or something similar.”

Read the rest here.

Jeffrey Kluger, “The End of an Epithet: How Hate Speech Dies” (Time, Jan. 25, 2013)

The roots of the anti-gay f-word are not what most people think they are. Popular lore has it that suspected homosexuals were once put to death by fire, and that piles of sticks — or “faggots,” in the antiquated term — were used as kindling. The pile-of-sticks definition is correct, but everything else appears not to be. “There’s no historical evidence that this is how and why it originated,” says Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Boston Globe and executive producer of the website Vocabulary.com. “Its first recorded use was in the early 20th century, when it was applied to women. As with words like queen, it then became an epithet for gay men.”

But there’s value even in the etymological misconception. Gay people may never have been put to the torch, but the widespread belief that they were serves to sensitize people to the very real bigotry—and often very real danger—they’ve faced over the centuries. “Even if it has no historical truth it has a different kind of truth as a lesson,” Zimmer says.

Read the rest here.

Jessica Brodsky, “‘Hashtag’ Voted Word of the Year by American Dialect Society” (Brown Daily Herald, Jan. 25, 2013)

The Word of the Year is one that is rarely spoken.

The word “hashtag” — the act of using a pound sign (#) followed by a word or phrase to tag a message on Twitter — was dubbed “Word of the Year 2012” by the American Dialect Society Jan. 4.

The word “hashtag” was created for Twitter in 2007 by compounding the British term for the pound symbol and “tag,” Twitter’s mechanism for categorizing posts. New words are formed from “building blocks that often come from other words, or else they may be common prefixes or suffixes that are attached to some base,” said Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society.

“As that word became more common, people didn’t think of it as being a compound anymore,” Zimmer said.

Read the rest here. (Related Word Routes column)

Jen Doll, “‘We, the People’: The Power of a Familiar Phrase Now” (The Atlantic Wire, Jan. 21, 2013)

Linguist and language columnist Ben Zimmer, who followed today’s swearing in and address and Obama’s first inauguration as well, told me that Obama’s 2009 speech included just one use of “We the People,” at the end of that speech’s second paragraph: “…We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears, and true to our founding documents.” In today’s address, however, Obama “relied on that rhetorical device as a repetitive touchstone, tying the ‘here and now’ of his speech to the legacy of the founding fathers,” Zimmer said, explaining that the phrase has a dual purpose: elevating the presidential rhetoric “by connecting it to the opening words of the Constitution, recognized by all, and framing his call to collective action by emphasizing the inclusive solidarity of that powerful first-person plural pronoun.” […]

Zimmer noted that the verbs used in the “we the people” sentences are declare, understand, and still believe, the latter of which he used three times. “By joining together in a shared declaration, understanding, and belief, Obama suggests, the country can make progress and transcend its divisions. The rhetorical frame allows him to take on modern challenges (climate change or gay rights, for instance), while still presenting policy initiatives of his second term as continuations of bedrock American principles: ‘what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.'”

Read the rest here. (Related Word Routes column)

Aisha Harris, “Who Coined the Term ‘Catfish’?” (Slate, Jan. 18, 2013)

The earliest version of the story that I’ve seen is from Henry W. Nevinson, whose 1913 book Essays in Rebellion was pointed out to me by the linguist Ben Zimmer. In one of those essays, “The Catfish,” Nevinson tells essentially the same tale—though the British Nevinson refers to the European fishing industry, rather than its North American equivalent. Nevinson explicitly compares the catfish anecdote to other allegorical Christian stories, including the tale of Faust and Mephistopheles and the Parable of the Leaven. For Nevinson, a noted suffragist, the catfish is Christianity itself, without which “the soul of Europe” would “have degenerated into a flabbiness, lethargy, and desperate peace.”

Read the rest here. (Related Boston Globe column)

Rebecca Greenfield, “Why We Hate the Word ‘Phablet’ So Much” (The Atlantic Wire, Jan. 11, 2013)

English words generally use “ph” as eff for words from Greek origin, Ben Zimmer explained today in his Word Routes column. Now “phablet” obviously isn’t Greek, but the Greek words it conjures sound kind of gross, Stanford linguistics PhD candidate Lelia Glass told us; a lot of “ph” words followed by the letter “a” happen to be body parts — “like ‘phallus’ and ‘phalanges,’ which perhaps grosses people out,” Glass said.

Zimmer has a different theory. “Phablet” isn’t the first non-Greek word we’ve made up with a “ph” making an eff sound, but unlike other modern word innovations — like “phat” — it doesn’t have a sense of humor, or at least not a very good one.

Read the rest here.