Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Words
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.
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Last week we featured a debate over contemporary usage of whom, with Baltimore Sun copy editor John McIntyre squaring off against Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky. To be honest, the exchange was a bit too civil and reasonable to live up to its billing as a "usage showdown" — at least based on the Visual Thesaurus definition of showdown as "a hostile disagreement face-to-face." I was amused to see that on his copy-editing blog, "You Don't Say," John McIntyre facetiously referred to the debate with an even more inappropriate term: smackdown, which most people (in the U.S. at least) would associate with professional wrestling. Other violent confrontations ending in -down include beatdown and throwdown. And where do hoedowns fit into all of this?
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Behind the DictionaryLexicographers Talk About Language
Usage Showdown: Who Are You Going to Listen to?
Yesterday we presented the first part in our usage showdown on "whom," from Baltimore Sun copy editor John E. McIntyre, a self-professed "moderate prescriptivist." Today we present the descriptivist side of the debate, from Arnold M. Zwicky, Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University, who frequently writes about matters of English usage on the group weblog Language Log. Let us know in the comments section which perspective you find more convincing, or sound off with your own opinion!
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Last month on the VT, a commenter complained about the use of the word "who" in a sentence beginning, "Joshua Kendall, who we interview this week..." This wasn't the first time that one of our readers objected to the use of "who" instead of "whom." Since this is such a contentious point of English usage, we thought we'd offer two different perspectives on the great "whom" debate. Today we present the viewpoint of John E. McIntyre, assistant managing editor for the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun, who runs an entertaining blog on copyediting, You Don't Say. Tomorrow we'll hear from a descriptive linguist, Arnold Zwicky of Stanford University. Let the showdown begin!
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It's hard to keep up with techie terms these days. Last week, Apple Inc. announced it would no longer use the word push to describe the way that its new online MobileMe service communicates to personal computers and electronic devices like the iPhone. Turns out the service wasn't always "pushing" data to "the cloud" as quickly as users were expecting. To which non-technophiles would probably say, "Huh?"
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For today's installment of Mailbag Friday, our question comes from VT subscriber Barry Francolino in Romania. (One of our many far-flung correspondents!) Barry writes, "Just interested to know where the word/phrase/idea pipe dream comes from." The definition given by the Visual Thesaurus, "a fantastic but vain hope (from fantasies induced by the opium pipe)," gives a whiff of its origin.
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Last Friday I was delighted to be a return guest on the Wisconsin Public Radio Show "At Issue with Ben Merens" (audio available here). Our ostensible topic was "words of the summer" (including skadoosh, of course!), but once we started taking calls from listeners, the floor was open to any topic of interest to word-savvy Wisconsinites. Much like what happened when I was on the show last December, conversation turned to perceived "gaps" in the English language that callers thought should be filled with new coinages. This time around, Robert from Coloma expressed dissatisfaction with the words boyfriend and girlfriend, suggesting a new word to cover both: inti-mate.
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