Ben Zimmer

Jennifer Schuessler, “Tweet This: ‘Hashtag’ Named Word of the Year” (New York Times, Jan. 7, 2013)

The baby named Hashtag buzzed about on the Internet in November may have been a hoax. But the American Dialect Society has given the Twitter-inspired term a boost by christening “hashtag” the word of the year.

The decision came at the society’s annual meeting in Boston over the weekend, where more than 250 linguists, lexicographers, grammarians, historians and other word maniacs weighed the relative merits of terms like “fiscal cliff,” “Gangnam style,” and “marriage equality.”

There were winners in 10 categories, including most unnecessary (“legitimate rape”), most euphemistic (“self-deportation”) and most creative (“gate lice,” meaning airline passengers who crowd around a gate waiting to board). “Binders (full of women)” was named top election-related word. “YOLO,” an acronym meaning “you only live once,” was named least likely to succeed. (It also finished strong in a recent contest nominating terms that should be purged from the language.) “Sandy” was voted name of the year.

In the main category, “hashtag” emerged as something of a dark-horse winner, edging out “fiscal cliff” and “marriage equality” (which took most likely to succeed honors), despite not being on the official list of nominees, as Ben Zimmer, the chairman of the society’s new words committee, noted in a rundown of the action. “This was the year when the hashtag became a ubiquitous phenomenon in online talk,” Mr. Zimmer said in a statement.

Read the rest here.

Colleen Ross, “Insights into the English Language” (CBC’s Word of Mouth, Jan. 7, 2013)

Other websites, including Vocabulary.com, offer audio pronunciations as well. Executive producer Ben Zimmer, who also presented at the convention, says the website used several opera singers to make the 140,000 sound files because they’re adept at interpreting the International Phonetic Alphabet. Consider it a grammatical serenade. […]

In the online world, you also lose the serendipity of discovering other words besides the one you looked up.

While Ben Zimmer acknowledges that, he says we’ll simply develop different orientations to text as we go online. He’s also the head of VisualThesaurus.com, which he says is modelled on how our brain works, and uses word maps.

Read the rest here.

Jen Doll, “The Final Countdown to the Word of the Year Is Here” (The Atlantic Wire, Jan. 4, 2013)

In advance of tonight’s meeting, which is open to the public, the Society has issued a list of nominations for what linguist and language columnist Ben Zimmer, who is chair of the New Words Committee for ADS, calls “the ‘lesser’ categories”: most useful, most likely to succeed, most outrageous, and so on. Regardless of any personal feelings you might have about the words therein, the list itself is a fascinating glimpse into our year in words. As for what to expect tonight, Zimmer tells us, “At the big event, we’ll vote for winners in those categories and then open it up for nominations in the main WOTY category. The nominees may come from the various other categories, or they might be new nominations, not on our curent list. (In past years, app and tweet have won WOTY after getting nominated from the floor.)”

Unlike last year, when occupy was the clear favorite, for 2012 there’s no obvious front-runner. Zimmer’s money is on fiscal cliff and YOLO as “most likely to make it to the final round of voting,” but he caveats that, saying, “these things are hard to predict!”

Read the rest here.

Julie Moos, “Will ‘Double Down’ Be Word of the Year?” (Poynter, Dec. 31, 2012)

Later this week, the American Dialect Society will select its word of the year for 2012. Possibilities include YOLO and selfie, linguist Ben Zimmer told NPR, but people may already be sick of those terms.

“I don’t think there’s any clear frontrunner this year,” Zimmer told Renee Montagne. There are two strong contenders, though. “Certainly, the term fiscal cliff has been used a lot in the last few months, and that could end up being the winner, in the same way that, for instance, bailout was the winner for the American Dialect Society four years ago.”

Read the rest here.

Interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition” about Word of the Year candidates for 2012 (Dec. 28, 2012).

There is a major decision coming up that will truly define the year 2012. Yes, it’s almost time for the American Dialect Society to once again vote on the Word of the Year. Will it be selfie? Hate-watching? Superstorm? Double down? Fiscal cliff? Or (shudder) YOLO?

Ben Zimmer is a language columnist for The Boston Globe and chairman of the American Dialect Society’s New Words Committee. He tells NPR’s Renee Montagne that the Word of the Year can be either a word or a phrase, as long as it’s achieved new prominence in 2012.

(Show page, audio, related Word Routes column, Boston Globe column)

Jennifer Schuessler, “The Whole Nine Yards About a Phrase’s Origin” (New York Times, Dec. 26, 2012)

The recent discovery of several instances of “the whole six yards” in newspapers from the 1910s — four decades before the earliest known references to “the whole nine yards” — opens a new window onto “the most prominent etymological riddle of our time,” said Fred Shapiro, a librarian at Yale Law School who announced the findings in next month’s issue of The Yale Alumni Magazine.

Other language experts agree about the import of the discovery. “The phrase is interesting because it’s so mysterious,” said Ben Zimmer, the executive producer of Visual Thesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com, who has written previously on the search for its origin. “It’s been a kind of Holy Grail.”

Read the rest here. (Related Word Routes column)

Interview on “At Issue with Ben Merens” (Wisconsin Public Radio) on the notable words of 2012. (Dec. 19, 2012)

Fiscal cliff, Gangnam Style, YOLO, Frankenstorm, malarkey…these are just a few of the words and phrases we’ve picked up during the last year. In this hour, Ben Merens and his guest “double down” and look at the top words of 2012. Guest: Ben Zimmer, executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com. He writes a biweekly language column for The Boston Globe and is the former “On Language” columnist for The New York Times Magazine.

(Show page, MP3, WMA, download, related Word Routes column, Boston Globe column)

Clyde Haberman, “Talking About Gun Restrictions Without Talking About ‘Gun Control’” (New York Times City Room blog, Dec. 19, 2012)

We have seen this time and again, with Americans “finding words to match their ideological point of view,” said Ben Zimmer, language columnist for The Boston Globe and executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com. It can result, he said, in a collision of euphemisms and their linguistic opposites, dysphemisms.

“Death tax” is a good example of a dysphemism, favored by lawmakers determined to do away with what is more neutrally known as an “estate tax” (or far from neutrally, by some just as determined to preserve this levy, a “Paris Hilton tax”). For a doozy of a euphemism, try “enhanced interrogation technique” to describe a practice like waterboarding, regarded by much of the world as torture.

Republican strategists have been notably adept at shaping debates with phrases that pack an emotional wallop: “partial-birth abortion” for a form of late-term abortion that is resorted to infrequently; “elites” as virtually a synonym for liberals; “job creators” to ennoble the super-rich.

“When Sarah Palin was talking about ‘death panels’ in the health care debate, it certainly created a kind of visceral backlash,” Mr. Zimmer said, “especially at a time when Democrats in Congress were talking about ‘the public option,’ which sounded quite bureaucratic and antiseptic.”

Read the rest here.

Maureen Dowd, “Watch Out Below!!!” (New York Times op/ed, Dec. 16, 2012)

The BBC examined the etymology of the phrase of the moment. The lexicographer Ben Zimmer discovered that an 1893 editorial in The Chicago Tribune warned: “The free silver shriekers are striving to tumble the United States over the same fiscal precipice.”

Zimmer traced the first use of “fiscal cliff” to the property section of The New York Times in 1957, in an article about people overextending their finances to buy their first home. Ben Bernanke imprinted the term on the public consciousness last February, pointing ominously toward Jan. 1.

Read the rest here. (Related Word Routes column)