Trend Results : Ben Zimmer
Blog Post Results (1-20 of 140)
FILTER RESULTS ►HPSG Man, by the Dead Tongues
Wow. Via Twitter, thanks to Jason Baldridge, retweeted by the one and only Ben Zimmer.
SKALLEWAGG.
A Visual Thesaurus post by Ben Zimmer is an interesting exploration of the history of a great word, scalawag:My latest column for the Boston Globe tells how Nathaniel Sharpe, a 22-year-old amateur genealogist from a small town in North...Show More Summary
BRODSKY'S SERAPHIC DOH.
Ben Zimmer sends me a link to this NYRB tweet—"First (and most likely only) occurrence of 'doh' in The New York Review, from 1979 http://j.mp/XsMwfT"—and asks "What do you suppose that seraphic (as opposed to Homeric) 'doh' was all about?"...Show More Summary
TOLSTOY SPEAKS!
Ben Zimmer sent me this YouTube clip of Tolstoy (recorded October 31st, 1909) reading from his book For Every Day in four languages, English, German, French, and Russian! Each language gets a segment of different length, and unfortunately...Show More Summary
Texting Tone
Jen Doll investigates the rise of “word lengthening,” adding extra letters, in intimate messages: Ben Zimmer, a linguist and lexicographer, notes that elongations, like emoticons and initialisms (OMG! LOL!), tend to flourish in those venues most starved for nuance. “When you’re dealing with IM, texting, and Twitter, those discursive functions that add to the simple message [...]
13 words and phrases we learned from Downton Abbey's third season
If you're like us, you've been closely following the trials and tribulations of the Granthams and those who serve them. Like last season, Ben Zimmer and Ben Schmidt have been busy catching the anachronisms. Zimmer recently noticed a doozy — steep learning curve — while Schmidt found such out-of-place terms as ritual humiliation and shenanigans. Show More Summary
Make Sure and What?
Ben Zimmer passed an interesting coordination my way, from Buzzfeed, from an article on a new website called Agency Wank, which “is collecting the wankiest, cringiest copy lines from ad agency websites”: Make sure and bookmark and visit Agency Wank. It’s updated daily. Something about the phrase is a little odd. Not actually bad, but [...]
French Word Police Ruke Against 'Hashtag'
I am feeling a bit proprietary about ‘hashtag’ these days, since Ben Zimmer of the American Dialect Society has researched the word and determined that I was the first to use it, back in 2007. As a result, I was shocked, shocked to learn...Show More Summary
'Hashtag' Is Selected As Word Of The Year By The American Dialect Society
I was involved in a twitter thread today with Ben Zimmer, who is a well-known lexicographer, and chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. He has been researching the Twitter hashtag, which was recently selected...Show More Summary
The word of the year is: Hashtag
American Dialect Society | Visual Thesaurus In a vote for 2012?s Word of the Year on Friday evening, “the slate filled with some expected choices, such as YOLO, fiscal cliff, 47 percent, and Gangnam style,” writes Ben Zimmer, linguist and … Read more
Will ‘double down’ be word of the year?
NPR | Boston Globe | Visual Thesaurus 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 … Read mor...
Here's The First Time 'Fiscal Cliff' Was Used In A Newspaper
When Ben Bernanke uttered the words "fiscal cliff" in February, he unleashed a wave of "fiscal cliff" debates that now dominates the headlines. Ben Zimmer, the language columnist for the Boston Globe, tracked down the first known example...Show More Summary
Sounding Like 1865
Ben Zimmer details how the Oxford English Dictionary helped Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay for Lincoln, master the language of 19th century America: One key to making the language historically suitable, he told me, was having the 20-volume print...
PANCHRONISMS.
Ben Zimmer has a Visual Thesaurus post on the language of Lincoln (see this LH post) with some good examples of anachronisms that I completely missed, like "imagine the possibilities," "I like our chances," "patronage jobs," and "lame-duck...Show More Summary
Black Friday
The annual Thanksgiving feast may have had its origins in Massachusetts, but "Black Friday" is one of Philadelphia's contributions to American culture. Ben Zimmer told the story in his 11/25/2011 Word Routes column: Today is the day after Thanksgiving, when holiday shopping kicks off and sales-hunters are in full frenzy. The day has come to be [...]
WOTY: Fiscal cliff?
Ben Zimmer at this very moment is talking on NPR about 'fiscal cliff' and the issue of the term as a possible Word of the Year came up. It was specifically mentioned that he chairs the American Dialect Society's 'New Words' committee. Hurrah. Little note: Further evidence for the richness of 'fiscal cliff', just do a Google image search.
Google Ngrams, Now Even Cooler
(Eugene Volokh) See here for more advanced features, including part-of-speech searching and much more. Thanks to Prof. Ben Zimmer (Language Log) for the pointer.
Ranking the Top 5 QBs in Steelers History After Roethlisberger Record
Ben Roethlisberger continues to stake his claim to being the best quarterback in Pittsburgh Steelers history. Big Ben just surpassed Bradshaw (27,989) for most pass yards in @ steelers history. # PITvsTEN — Jon Zimmer (@NFLhistory) October...Show More Summary
New light from Toobin on the oath flub story
A new book by Jeffrey Toobin, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, is published today. It opens with a prologue telling the story of the Obama inaugural oath flub, first told on Language Log in Ben Zimmer's piece "Adverb placement in the oath flub and the follow-up a day later [...]
Wednesday Words: Surf Speak, Convention Vocabulary and More
acq-hire (v.): to buy a company in order to absorb its human resources. This definition is adapted from a Visual Thesaurus piece by linguist Ben Zimmer. He traces the term to a 2005 blog post, which describes the act thusly: “When a large company ‘purchases’ a small company with no employees other than its founders, [...]
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