Leave it to lexicographers to sneak a word like hypallage into a press release. The occasion is the Word of the Year from Webster's New World Dictionary (yes, it's Word of the Year season already). Webster's New World chose distracted driving as its Word of the Year for 2009, defined as "use of a cellphone or other portable electronic device while operating a motor vehicle." The press release notes that distracted driving features a "linguistic catch" that is "frequently seen in poetry": hypallage. Say what?Continue reading...
At a scenic dropoff near the Lounge, whereunder flows the mighty torrent of English, we have lookouts posted whose job is to spot trends. Recently they have reported back on instances of a certain class of words that are ready for a closeup: a handful of nouns formed by fusing the two parts of a phrasal verb. Such words are legion in English (setback, breakdown, frameup, washout, etc.) but we lack a handy term to designate them: snaptos? pairups? glueons? In any case, this month's Lounge is a rundown of our lookouts' pickups.Continue reading...
Exploring a topic discussed here back in April, the British linguist John Wells considers how people are forming the past tense of the verb "to text" (often pronounced, like the present tense, as "text"). Read about it on Dr. Wells's phonetics blog here.