Ben Zimmer
- Website: http://benzimmer.com/
- I am the executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, and language columnist for The Boston Globe. I'm also the former On Language columnist for The New York Times Magazine. Since 2005 (when I became a regular contributor to Language Log), I have been a research associate at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. I've also worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press (2006-2008) and consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. I currently serve as chair of the American Dialect Society's New Words Committee. You can follow me on Twitter or Facebook.
Posts by Ben Zimmer:
On letting one's guard (and pants) down
Mark Liberman noted (as did Neal Whitman on his Literal-Minded blog) a case of syllepsis in an Atlantic piece by Conor Friedersdorf: "What conservative Washington Post readers got, when they traded in Dave Weigel for [Jennifer] Rubin, was a lot more hackery and a lot less informed about the presidential election." But Weigel offered up a nice syllepsis of his own on Twitter today:
Also, pants. RT @washingtonpost: With Paula Broadwell, Gen. David Petraeus let his guard down: wapo.st/ZoUvd0
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) November 11, 2012
"We are all the other now"
Writing recently for the online Ideas section of Time, Jeffrey Kluger took on the "We are all X (now)" trope, or as it's called in these parts, a snowclone. "This increasingly common trope has an easy, fill-in-the-blank quality to it that allows us to affect a bit of purloined heroism, put it on the credit card of someone else, and feel pretty darned good about ourselves in the bargain," he writes. Kluger quotes me on the history of the snowclone (which I looked into for a 2006 LL post), and its ready adaptability to various expressions of empathy and solidarity. Now, in a thinkpiece about Obama's re-election, David Simon (creator of the HBO shows "The Wire" and "Treme") takes the snowclone to its logical conclusion: "We are all the other now." Read the rest of this entry »
"Too much Obama vote"
For the linguistically sensitive, one of the burning questions stemming from last night's election-night coverage was, "When did vote become a mass noun?" Several observers picked up on the usage: Monica Macaulay on the Mr. Verb blog, Nancy Friedman on the Fritinancy blog, and Josef Fruehwald, Jonah Ostroff, Dane Pritchard, Kate Stafford, and Elizabeth Preston on Twitter. If you missed the mass-nounification of vote, you can hear several examples in this clip documenting the remarkable moment on Fox News when Megyn Kelly confronts her number-crunching Decision Desk colleagues after Karl Rove questioned their call of Ohio for Obama:
Don't be discouraged from not voting
Ben Yagoda spotted a nice case of overnegation on NPR's "Morning Edition" earlier today, when Renee Montagne interviewed political science professor Michael McDonald about early voting. After explaining that Obama was leading in early voting in Nevada, McDonald said, "I don't want to discourage people from not voting today." Read the rest of this entry »
The he's and she's of Twitter
My latest column for the Boston Globe is about some fascinating new research presented by Tyler Schnoebelen at the recent NWAV 41 conference at Indiana University Bloomington. Schnoebelen's paper, co-authored with Jacob Eisenstein and David Bamman, is entitled "Gender, styles, and social networks in Twitter" (abstract, full paper, presentation).
"Oppan Chomsky Style"
Somehow, Language Log has yet to take notice of the international sensation that is "Gangnam Style," the deliciously weird Korean pop video that currently has more than 560 million views on YouTube. Here's a good opportunity to rectify that oversight: among the countless spoofs of the video is this one by enterprising MIT students, featuring a cameo by Noam Chomsky at 3:20.
Obama's "is is"
During last night's presidential debate, usage maven Bryan A. Garner opined on Twitter that "President Obama is addicted to 'is is.'" Garner also directed Twitter followers to his treatment of "is is" in Garner's Modern American Usage, where he writes, "Rarely is this form found in writing, even when speech containing it is transcribed. In any event, it isn't an expression for careful speakers." But few would characterize Obama (despite his occasional lapses) as a careless speaker, and we do in fact have accurate transcripts of all three presidential debates to test the claim that Obama has an "is is" addiction. So let's check. Read the rest of this entry »
Newborn searches for crash blossom
Amy Reynaldo spotted this crash blossom currently featured on the home page of the Chicago Tribune:
A new chapter for Google Ngrams
When Google's Ngram Viewer was launched in December 2010 it encouraged everyone to be an amateur computational linguist, an amateur historical lexicographer, or a little of both. Today, the public interface that allows users to plumb the Google Books megacorpus has been relaunched, and the new version makes it even more enticing to researchers, both scholarly and nonscholarly. You can read all about it in my online piece for The Atlantic, as well as Jon Orwant's official introduction on the Google Research blog.
Bipartisanship (the bad kind)
Some news about the presidential debates from Politico, as reported by Dylan Byers:
Philips pulls presidential debate sponsorship
Philips Electronics has dropped its sponsorship of the 2012 presidential debates, citing a desire not to associate itself with bipartisanship, POLITICO has learned.
That lede might cause many readers to do a double-take. If bipartisanship is conventionally understood to mean "cooperation between the two major political parties," why would Philips be opposed to such cooperation? If they don't favor bipartisanship, doesn't that mean they favor partisanship instead? But no: in this case, bipartisanship is actually the equivalent of partisanship, which are both in opposition to nonpartisanship. Read the rest of this entry »
Panel on Digital Dictionaries (MLA/LSA/ADS)
Eric Baković has noted the happy confluence of the annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America and the Modern Language Association, both scheduled for January 3-6, 2013 at sites within reasonable walking distance of each other in Boston. (The LSA will be at the Boston Marriott Copley Place, and the MLA at the Hynes Convention Center and the Sheraton Boston.) Eric has plugged the joint organized session on open access for which he will be a panelist, so allow me to do the same for another panel with MLA/LSA crossover appeal. The MLA's Discussion Group on Lexicography has held a special panel for several years now, but many lexicographers and fellow travelers in linguistics have been unable to attend because of the conflict with the LSA and the concurrent meeting of the American Dialect Society. This time around, with the selected topic of "Digital Dictionaries," the whole MLA/LSA/ADS crowd can join in.
Read the rest of this entry »
Ambiguity watch: failing families, killing New Yorkers
Here are two items of ambiguity in advertising, one intentional and one not. First the apparently unintentional ambiguity: a new commercial from the Romney presidential campaign entitled "Failing American Families."
As the terse voiceover puts it, “Barack Obama. More spending. More debt. Failing American Families.”
Read the rest of this entry »
A cautionary vision of things to come
Randall Munroe's latest xkcd strip:
Sounding the alarm on the subjunctive
From the After Deadline blog of Phil Corbett, style guru at the New York Times, comes this 1924 letter to the editor calling for a Congressional investigation into the imperiled state of the English subjunctive:
Remembering Neil Armstrong and his "one small step"
Since the death of Neil Armstrong on Saturday, many remembrances have told the story about his famously flubbed first words on the moon. From Ian Crouch on The New Yorker's News Desk blog:
When the lunar module, named the Eagle, touched down, following moments of radio silence that terrified the folks back in mission control, he relayed: “Houston: Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Later, as he made his way out of the lunar module (or LM), he described his progress in banal terms that, because of where they were coming from and what they conveyed, rose to the level of magic: “I’m going to step off the LM now.” And then he issued what is among the most famous proclamations of the last century—a jubilant counterbalance to F.D.R.’s “Day of Infamy” speech and a capstone to J.F.K.’s declaration that “we choose to go to the moon”—a statement that Armstrong had composed and prepared just hours earlier, in between the more pressing business of operating space equipment, according to Armstrong’s biographer, James Hansen: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” Read the rest of this entry »