Ben Zimmer

VT subscriber Kcecelia of San Francisco, CA writes in about yesterday's Visual Thesaurus Word of the Day: dude. She observes that the word's current usage has little to do with its more historical sense, "a man who is much concerned with his dress and appearance":

Last month a 20-something man in an Oregon gas station punctuated his conversation with me with references to me as dude. I am a 55-year-old woman. Also, people say duuuude as an exclamation or interjection. I sometimes say dude myself in a more joking manner to people I am with who are sprinkling it liberally into their conversation. I do not mean that they are a fop or a dandy.

Especially now that Todd Palin, husband of Gov. Sarah Palin, is in the news as Alaska's "First Dude," this is a good time to reflect on the peculiar history of this all-American word. Continue reading...

The 11th edition of the venerable yet idiosyncratic Chambers Dictionary has just been published. Unlike the 11th editions of its lexicographical rivals Merriam-Webster's Collegiate and the Concise Oxford (everybody's going to 11 these days), the big news surrounding the latest Chambers is not about its new words. Rather, the British press has focused on some remarks made in the introduction to the dictionary, written by Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman. Paxman evidently likes to poke fun at all things Scottish, but he stepped over the line when he referred to the work of Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet, as nothing more than "sentimental doggerel."

For today's Mailbag Friday, we hear from Barbara Z. of Norfolk, VA. She writes: "On the radio I was listening to the beginning of "The Thomas Jefferson Hour" in which Clay Jenkinson speaks as if he were Jefferson. I heard him say the following:

'I happen to live in the first great era when books were widespreadly available...'

Last time on Word Routes, we looked at a spelling error that's common enough to show up frequently in edited text: using acclimation when you mean acclamation. That's a case of battling homophones: the two words sound the same, but they have different meanings. The problem crops up with other sound-alikes, such as imminent vs. immanent, compliment vs. complement, principle vs. principal, and of course affect vs. effect. (We talked about that last pair recently in our interview with Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary.) These mix-ups are particularly insidious because your spellchecker won't bail you out — unless, perhaps, you are using a contextual spellchecker like the one that has been developed for Microsoft Office.