Vocabulary.com Blog Contributor
Ben Zimmer
Ben Zimmer is language columnist for The Wall Street Journal and former language columnist for The Boston Globe and The New York Times Magazine. He has worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. In addition to his regular "Word Routes" column here, he contributes to the group weblog Language Log. He is also the chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society.
It's been a whirlwind week since the official announcement that I would be taking over the "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine, the old stomping grounds of the late lamented Language Maven, William Safire. I'm grateful for all of the warm messages of congratulation I've received, and I also remain cognizant that in taking over Safire's column, I have extremely big shoes to fill.
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If you watched the Oscars on Sunday, like many other viewers you were probably left scratching your head when, after "Music by Prudence" won for Best Documentary Short, there was a struggle for the microphone between two of the film's creators. Elinor Burkett snatched the microphone from Roger Ross Williams, in what was almost immediately dubbed a "Kanye moment." Or you could say Burkett "pulled a Kanye," or that Williams simply got "Kanye'd."
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
At the Movies: Plumbing the Depths of "The Hurt Locker"
One of the frontrunners for Best Picture in Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony is Kathryn Bigelow's tense depiction of a U.S. bomb squad unit in Iraq, The Hurt Locker. The movie's official website says of the title, "In Iraq, it is soldier vernacular to speak of explosions as sending you to 'the hurt locker.'" In fact, like so much American military slang, hurt locker (along with related hurt expressions) dates back to the Vietnam War.
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During President Obama's health care summit last week, Republican House Whip Eric Cantor suffered a bit of a misspeak, saying: "We have a very difficult bridge to gap here." Whoops! It's the gap that needs bridging, of course, not vice versa.
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Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
Owning the Podium (and the Lectern)
Depending on whether you're an Olympic athlete or President Obama, podium's meaning can change.
What's the difference between a podium and a lectern?
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It's time once again for the cream of the crosswording crop to converge on the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Brooklyn, New York. Last year the nail-biting final round saw Tyler Hinman emerge victorious for the fifth consecutive year (his thrilling first win was captured in the documentary Wordplay). Will Tyler manage to pull off #6, or is it time for a new winner — like, say, last year's breakout star Dan Feyer?
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Over the last few days, America's Eastern seaboard has seen record levels of snow... accompanied by record levels of snow wordplay. There has been a blizzard of "portmanteau words" involving snow, with snowmageddon and snowpocalypse leading the way. On Twitter, the hashtag of choice has been snOMG, compactly joining snow with the online interjection OMG. We haven't seen this much seasonal word-blending since 2008's "summer of the staycation."
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