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Edwin Battistella’s Word of the Year Fantasy League

By Edwin Battistella
Oxford Dictionaries have been collecting lexicographic material and updating dictionaries for over a century now, though its Word of the Year award is still relatively recent. Only since 2004 Oxford Dictionaries have been selecting a word that captures the mood of the previous year. Thinking about the possible contenders for 2013 (twerk? fail? drone? shutdown? bitcoin?) got me to wondering about the past.

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Edwin Battistella’s words

By Edwin Battistella
The annual Word of the Year selection by Oxford Dictionaries and others inspired me to an odd personal challenge last year. In November of 2011, about the time that Oxford Dictionaries were settling on squeezed middle as both the UK and US word of the year, I made a New Year’s Resolution for 2012.

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

Doppelganger names

We often think of personal names as specific to an individual, and sometimes they are. Yet often they are not. After all, the same individual may go by more than one name.

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

What I learned from reading Harlan Ellison

When I was in high school, I went through a Harlan Ellison phase. Ellison, who died in 2017, was a prolific science fiction and screenwriter and the author of such stories as “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” and “A Boy and His Dog,” as well as the celebrated Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.”

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

What to do with too many books?

A while ago, my wife and I had some work done on our house, which entailed packing up a half-dozen bookcases until the work was done. We took the opportunity to sift through our books and to decide what we no longer needed. Deciding what to keep and what to let go of was a delicate negotiation. But equally tricky was deciding what to do with books we no longer needed.

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

Slow down your writing

Sentences that are clear in our heads may be less clear when they come out of our mouths. When we talk, we get feedback from our audience or conversational partners. We observe facial expressions and body language. People may ask for clarification when something is not clear or they may correct us when we misspeak. Understanding is never perfect, but it’s doable in many face-to-face instances. On the page or the screen, it’s a different story.

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

Fashion lingo

As a linguist, I understand that language shifts and changes.  The voiced z sound of houses is being replaced by an unvoiced s sound.  The abbreviation A.I. has become a verb, as in “He A.I.ed it.” Neologisms abound, tracked by the American Dialect Society, and new words often make us think of things in new ways.

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

Some barely iconic, epic usages

As a linguist, I understand that language shifts and changes.  The voiced z sound of houses is being replaced by an unvoiced s sound.  The abbreviation A.I. has become a verb, as in “He A.I.ed it.” Neologisms abound, tracked by the American Dialect Society, and new words often make us think of things in new ways.

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

Does “the” get italics?

One of the idiosyncrasies of copy editing that befuddles me involves the word “the”. Should it be capitalized and italicized when one refers to newspaper titles in a piece of writing? The Chicago Manual of Style will tell you no. 

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

Don’t be afraid to switch tenses

Reading a book on the 1992 chess match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer, I came across this sentence:  “Twenty years ago, to the very day, Fischer had swept to victory, to become crowed as the 11th World Champion, against the self-same Spassky, then the Soviet World Champion.”

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

Self words

Reading a book on the 1992 chess match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer, I came across this sentence:  “Twenty years ago, to the very day, Fischer had swept to victory, to become crowed as the 11th World Champion, against the self-same Spassky, then the Soviet World Champion.”

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

The hidden language of crosswords

I got a book of New York Times crossword puzzles, edited by Will Shortz, as a gift. I had never been a crossword addict or even an aficionado, but a gift is meant to be enjoyed, so I began working through the puzzles in the evenings as I watched the news.

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

Some very unique redundancies

One of the quirkier features of the English syntax has to do with the simple word all. All is a quantity word, or quantifier in the terminology of grammarians and logicians. It indicates an entirety of something.

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

Can a word have an existential crisis?

A while back, a philosopher friend of mine was fretting about the adjective “existential.” She was irked by people using it to refer to situations which threaten the existence of something, as when someone refers to climate change as an “existential crisis,” or more commonly, as “an existential threat.”

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

All about all

One of the quirkier features of the English syntax has to do with the simple word all. All is a quantity word, or quantifier in the terminology of grammarians and logicians. It indicates an entirety of something.

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

The word on arithmetic

When we think of genre, it is often in the sense of literature or film. However, rhetoricians will tell us that genre is a concept that includes any sort of writing that has well-defined conventions, such as business memos, grant proposals, obituaries, syllabi, and much more.

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