Last month, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced that it had acquired a dictionary owned by David Foster Wallace, as part of its extensive Wallace archive. Wallace's copy of the American Heritage Dictionary was full of words that the late writer had circled. The Ransom Center released a sampling of Wallace's circled words, but now Slate's Browbeat blog has revealed the complete list. It's a fascinating collection. Continue reading...
Ever wonder how work is done at the Oxford English Dictionary, the world's largest and most prestigious English-language dictionary project? We got the inside story from none other than Jesse Sheidlower, OED editor at large, who works on North American materials out of the dictionary's New York office. In the first installment of our three-part interview, Jesse explains how the OED's North American Reading Program operates. (Note the firmly American spelling of "Program"!) The reading programs (or programmes) have been radically transformed by the digital revolution, but at the same time they still follow the traditions set down 150 years ago by James Murray, the dictionary's first editor. As Jesse explains, the OED relied on "the wisdom of crowds" for the gathering of historical evidence long before the age of Wikipedia. Continue reading...
Is there any point in remaining "spoiler-free," steering clear of any crucial plot points of movies or television shows you haven't seen yet? That's the question raised by Netflix in its new "Living with Spoilers" campaign, and it set me off on a search for the roots of the "spoiler" in my latest column for the Wall Street Journal. Continue reading...
I confess, I'm a word nerd. When I was a kid, I didn't keep a diary (grasping even at eight that the exploits of an introverted bookworm with a peaceful home life were perhaps not the stuff that formed a fascinating read), but I did keep a list of words that I liked: Burble. Murmur. Placate. Superfluous. Chaos. It's the specificity that got -- and gets -- me. My mom isn't just "kind" -- she's compassionate, altruistic and decent.
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Today's Mailbag Friday question comes from Bob D., a doctor from Newton, Massachusetts. Bob asks: "What is up with the constant misuse of the word regime? It drives me crazy. It is like regimen never existed." Continue reading...
There's a new campaign to boost awareness of U.S. public libraries that goes by the curious name, "Geek the Library." I'm all for the campaign's stated mission of improving public perceptions of libraries by championing their importance to local communities. But what really fascinates me is the way they're using geek as a transitive verb to mean "be geekily enthusiastic about." I guess you could say I geek innovative uses of the word geek. Continue reading...
Retailers, not content with branding products, have lately taken to branding days of the week, as a way to hype the holiday shopping rush. "Black Friday," the name for the day after Thanskgiving, was transformed from a negative to a positive by some clever etymological mythologizing (make that etymythologizing). Then the Monday after Thanksgiving was christened "Cyber Monday," and now some marketers would like to extend that to a "Cyber Week." Continue reading...
After former NBA star Manute Bol died over the weekend, tributes in the sports pages recognized his awesome shot-blocking skills (it helped that he was 7-foot-7) and his equally awesome humanitarian work in his native Sudan. Another frequently cited legacy is that Bol popularized (or even coined) the expression "my bad" as an athletic mea culpa. On the ESPN gabfest "Around the Horn," Bill Plaschke even said of the supposed coinage, "Language experts have pretty much proven this." Let's investigate. Continue reading...
In the spirit of New Year's resolutions like quit smoking, lose weight, exercise more, each January brings new calls to ban words, the linguistic equivalent of losing weight. But while New Year's resolutions are self-imposed — I decide that an hour on the elliptical watching Sherlock would be better than an hour on the couch with Sherlock and a bowl of chips — word bans tend to be imposed by someone else. Continue reading...
Last week in part one of our interview with Oxford English Dictionary editor at large Jesse Sheidlower, we talked about the OED's century-and-a-half reliance on volunteer readers to help gather historical citations — a practice now trendily called "crowdsourcing." This week we delve into how the OED has adapted to the digital age through the creation of the online edition, which includes the entire text of the 20-volume print edition as well as all the newly revised material for the planned Third Edition. It's an unprecedented electronic undertaking, but some worry that it presages the end of the print OED. Continue reading...