14 décembre 2014

By Allan Metcalf. So on a rainy Monday in D.C. last month, at the Pavilion Café in the sculpture garden on the National Mall, I was lunching with Joan Hall, editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, and Ben Zimmer, executive producer of Vocabulary.com, columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. That’s the committee that oversees the society’s annual choice of Word of the Year. And we agreed 2014 hasn’t been the greatest year for a WOTY (as we familiarly call it). More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. A century ago this year, just before the First World War began, the grammarian George O. Curme published a short but remarkable paper entitled “Origin and Force of the Split Infinitive” (Modern Language Notes 29 (2), 41–45). It has deep roots in the 19th-century tradition of critical analysis of English grammar. And it is sobering to compare his paper’s meaty content with the thin gruel that passes for discussion of English grammar today. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. They arrive now, in a flood, the end-of term papers. For the most part, they are beyond revision at this point, and the task ahead consists mostly of assessment. Still, I find myself clinging to my Luddite position of accepting papers only in hard copy, regardless of the risk of germ transmission by paper, regardless of deforestation, regardless of the printing costs or the various excuses the demand engenders. More...

By William Germano. Recently I was at a dinner party where people were using the words awful  and awesome, possibly as antonyms. Awful  was, I thought, used to describe something very bad, awesome something very good. The words awesome and awful have been doing do-si-do with one another for a while. So are they the same word? And if so, what word is that, exactly?
The Oxford English Dictionary records awful as medieval. Since the ninth century, it’sbeen the high-toned term of choice meaning “awe-inspiring,” in the sense of “causing dread; terrible, dreadful, appalling.” But awful is also “worthy of, or commanding, profound respect or fear,” and has been in that sense for almost as long.
Awful seems to sustain a body blow at the beginning of the 19^th century, when it takes on the meaning “frightful, very ugly, monstrous; and hence as a mere intensive deriving its sense from the context = Exceedingly bad, great, long, etc.” A mere intensive? Say it isn’t so. More...

By Ben Yagoda. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The new paradigm for creative folk, that is. Dispense with jobs, with their soul-deadening cubicles and time clocks (metaphorical or literal) and bosses looking over your shoulders—but also, admittedly, with their clockwork paychecks and medical benefits—and become your own brand. More...