Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Words
It's that time again, the annual look back at the noteworthy words of the year. Were you worried about dangling over the fiscal cliff, or did you have more of a devil-may-care YOLO attitude? Were you more interested in mansplaining or hate-watching? Here's a roundup of words that's not just a bunch of malarkey.
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For my latest Boston Globe column, I talked to screenwriter Tony Kushner about how he crafted the dialogue for Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln." I had been intrigued about Kushner's script-writing process after hearing that he had consulted the Oxford English Dictionary to check any word that might have been inappropriate for the film's 1865 setting. While the results of this painstaking work are admirable, it's always possible to nitpick over possible anachronisms.
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Blog Excerpts
Scandal at the OED? Not So Much
Earlier this week, an article in the Guardian reported that "an eminent former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins and bizarrely blamed previous editors." But it turns out that this seemingly sensational story is "completely bogus," according to OED editor at large Jesse Sheidlower. Read Sheidlower's explanation on The New Yorker's Culture Desk blog here. (Update, 12/3: Our own Ben Zimmer has a column about the pseudo-controversy on the New York Times op/ed page.)
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."
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Blog Excerpts
Back in Black: On the Origins of "Black Friday"
"Black" doesn't refer to retailers' books
On Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, Americans kick off the holiday shopping season with a bang. In his Word Routes column last year, lexicographer Ben Zimmer explored the origins of the phrase "Black Friday." It is not, as many believe, the day when retailers' balance sheets change from red to black.
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Last February, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke warned the House of Representatives that "under current law, on January 1st, 2013, there is going to be a massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and tax increases." Now, with the election over, President Obama and the lame-duck Congress are trying to figure out a way to avoid the "fiscal cliff." But where did the phrase come from? And is the cliff metaphor really so apt?
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Dog EaredBooks we love
"The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language"
The Horologicon ("book of hours") is a reference book. Its author, Mark Forsyth (who writes the Inky Fool blog), says so. But it is a very unusual reference book — the kind you could read from cover to cover in an evening or two, and would, willingly and happily.
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