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OK? OK!
A new book by Allan Metcalf, Professor of English at MacMurray College and Executive Secretary of the American Dialect Society, is all about the history of a single word: OK. You can read a Q&A with Metcalf about OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word on the Oxford University Press blog here.
The outrage over new security procedures enforced by the Transportation Security Administration has thrust the word pat-down into the news. Airline passenger screenings in the U.S. now involve full-body scans, or if the passenger refuses the scan, a full-body pat-down. While the TSA faces backlash against these so-called "enhanced pat-downs" (an unfortunate term reminiscent of "enhanced interrogation techniques" at Guantanamo), plain-old pat-downs have been part of the lexicon of law enforcement for decades.
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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.
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We welcome back Merrill Perlman, who writes the "Language Corner" column for Columbia Journalism Review. Here she considers how "scapegoat" gets turned into "escape goat" — an error that actually has an etymological basis.
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Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About Language
Election Day Special: Are Senators "Congressmen"?
In learning about the Constitution in my American history class in junior high, we learned about the Framers, checks and balances, three branches of government, and all the rest. We learned about the bicameral legislature, i.e., the two chambers of the United States Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. But after learning all that, I wondered: Where did congressmen fit into the picture with all these representatives and senators? I'd seen campaign signs referring to "Congressman So-and-so"; I'd heard encouragements to "write your congressman!"; who were these congressmen?
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A sighting of a "corrections institution" has us thinking about the gamut of terms used for the punishment end of the criminal justice system.
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The English language is full of paradoxes, like the fact that "literally" pretty much always means "figuratively. Other words mean their opposites as well — "scan" means both 'read closely' and 'skim.' "Restive" originally meant 'standing still' but now it often means 'antsy.' "Dust" can mean 'to sprinkle with dust' and 'to remove the dust from something.' "Oversight" means both looking closely at something and ignoring it. "Sanction" sometimes means 'forbid,' sometimes, 'allow.' And then there's "ravel," which means 'ravel, or tangle' as well as its opposite, 'unravel,' as when Macbeth evokes "Sleepe that knits up the rauel'd Sleeue of Care."
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