Paul Hiebert, “Our Obsession with the Word ‘Random’: Fear of a Millennial Planet” (The Awl, Mar. 3, 2011)
I met with now-former New York Times “On Language” magazine columnist Ben Zimmer one afternoon at a coffee shop in SoHo to discuss the contemporary onslaught of perceived randomness. He is the executive producer of two language-related websites, a consultant for the OED, a graduate of linguistics from Yale, a member of the American Dialect Society and the Dictionary Society of North America, and is not a nerd, but a gentleman.
Zimmer describes the word random as a defuser of social tension, a kind of “all-purpose label” for anything out of the norm.
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