Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
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.
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.
When I’m reading or listening to a book, I sometimes find myself momentarily drifting away from what the author is saying and worrying about words and phrases I encounter.
Why do we say chicken and egg but never egg and chicken? English has hundreds of these fixed binomial expressions, each following subtle linguistic rules. From Yakov Malkiel’s early studies to the forensic clue that helped catch the Unabomber, binomials reveal how deeply word order shapes meaning.
Recently, I went to a talk on telicity in verbs. If the term is unfamiliar to you, you are not alone.
My grandmother was one of those speakers who had an “r” in the word wash, pronouncing it “warsh”. For her, the nation’s capital was “Warshington”, D.C., and the vegetable was a “squarsh.”
For several years, I taught a course on the history of publishing.
One of the odder bits of language use is the phenomenon of overnegation, or misnegation.
Book reviews, like books themselves, come in all shapes and sizes. There are the sometimes inflated rah-rahs on Amazon or Goodreads, or short reviews in Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and Choice.
I’ve been reading S. Jay Keyser’s fascinating book Play It Again Sam, which (despite its waggish title) is a serious and insightful study of the role of repetition in the verbal, musical, and visual arts.
Book reviews, like books themselves, come in all shapes and sizes. There are the sometimes inflated rah-rahs on Amazon or Goodreads, or short reviews in Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and Choice.
When I read slowly, I’m a somewhat easily distracted reader. I might ponder an idea, puzzle at a phrasing, or admire elegance and style. Sometimes, though, it is unexpected words that cause me to stop and wonder about their origins.
The word good does a lot of work in English. Aside from its garden-variety sense (as in “good game” or “good job” or “good dog”), we find the word has a number of extended uses.
I miss a lot of things about the decline of paper newspapers, especially the comic strips. The comics were verbal humor with pictures and recurring characters, and the language of the comics provided a window into how spoken language was represented in print.
A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate course on “Cons, Cults, and Conspiracies Theories,” exploring the connections and parallels among those phenomena.
A while ago, a reader pointed me to a comment on another writer’s OUPblog piece. The comment complained about a caption on a photo, an image of the painting “Adam and Eve in Paradise” by the seventeenth-century Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger.