Motoko Rich, “Making a Word Meme” (New York Times, May 19, 2013)
The phrase [“lean in”] had a life before Ms. [Sheryl] Sandberg used it. It was frequently invoked in sports (lean in to the slope, lean in to the wave) and evolved into a metaphor for embracing risk, said Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, and language columnist for The Boston Globe.
Read the rest here.