David Kamp, “Permalinks,” review of Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web (New York Times Book Review, Mar. 23, 2008)
I also liked being taken off the beaten path and into a blogger’s area of obsessive, esoteric interest. … In the case of the blogger Benjamin Zimmer, a linguistic anthropologist, it’s language that turns him on. News reports of the infamously lovelorn NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak inspired Zimmer to write a lengthy, multipost exegesis of singular-versus-plural approaches to the word “diaper,” as in “wearing a diaper” versus “wearing diapers.”
Read the rest here.