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Conan's "Thrice" Campaign
Late-night talk-show host Conan O'Brien doesn't see why new words like chillax and frienemy should be added to the Oxford English Dictionary when useful old words like thrice have fallen out of favor. Watch Conan's campaign to get people using thrice again here.
The American Dialect Society’s annual meeting is coming up, and like all word nerds, I have Word of the Year fever. I won’t be in Pittsburgh for the meeting, but as the only euphemism columnist in this star quadrant, I want to make a case for euphemism of the year.
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What's "cherpumple"? Let naming expert and word-watcher Nancy Friedman define it for you...
Cherpumple: A dessert comprising cherry, pumpkin, and apple pies, each baked inside a layer of cake. The word is a portmanteau of cherry, pumpkin, and apple. Continue reading...Word RoutesExploring the pathways of our lexicon
"Truthiness": The Silly Word that Feels Wrong in Your Mouth
This Sunday marks the fifth anniversary of the premiere episode of "The Colbert Report," Stephen Colbert's endlessly entertaining sendup of political pundit programs. On that episode, Colbert introduced the word "truthiness," which has proved so popular that it has entered the latest edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary. For my On Language column in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, I had the pleasure of interviewing Colbert (as himself, not his put-upon persona) and learned the inside story of "truthiness." Here is an extended excerpt from our conversation.
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Evasive ManeuversEuphemisms old and new
Quench Your Thirst! (Within the Defect Action Levels, Of Course)
I've been embracing my adopted city of Chicago by reading a collection of Chicago Tribune legend Mike Royko's writing — namely, Sez Who? Sez Me. I haven't read Royko since I was a mere tyke (or at least a small dweeb) who was too young to fully grasp the awesomeness of Royko's hilarious, sharp, wide-ranging columns. They hold up great, and one piece on the end of the Vietnam war could pretty much be reprinted verbatim right now, at the (sorta) end of the Iraq war.
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While reading the Aug. 19 Rolling Stone and trying to wrap my brain around Matt Taibbi's latest piece on our country's ongoing financial shenanigans, I stumbled onto an article on Katy Perry, who I know very little about due to my old age.
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A new exhibit at the British Library on the evolution of English will feature some linguistic play that presages the age of "text-speak." As reported by The Guardian, the exhibit will display a comic poem printed in 1867 with lines like "I wrote 2 U B 4" ("I wrote to you before"). I've investigated this proto-text-speak and have found similar versified examples going all the way back to 1828.
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