Today's Mailbag Friday question comes all the way from Dakar, Senegal. Jodi W. asks: "What's up with texted? As in, 'I texted her yesterday.' Is it a real word?"Continue reading...
The recent hijacking of the Maersk Alabama cargo ship off the coast of Somalia serves as a chilling reminder that seagoing pirates continue to threaten international waters, from the Gulf of Aden to the Straits of Malacca. For many of us, it's peculiar to see the word pirate making headlines, since it seems so out of place in the 21st century — at least outside of Disney theme parks.Continue reading...
Yesterday I had the privilege of appearing on the WNYC radio show Soundcheck to talk about the origins of booing. The news hook was a recent Metropolitan Opera production of La Sonnambula that got booed by the audience thanks to its avant-garde staging. Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout discussed the booing incident, and I was there to provide some historical and linguistic context.Continue reading...
Yesterday in the Language Lounge, we took a look at what happens when a trademark ends up lapsing into generic use. The term genericide came up as a description for this loss of a trademark's protected status. The word raised some eyebrows among our readers, as well it should.Continue reading...
With the deepening of "The Great Recession" (or whatever we end up calling the current crisis), our language continues to reflect the tough economic times. Here is a primer on recession-related terminology that has been circulating in recent months, as we struggle to put the global financial uncertainty into words.Continue reading...
Among the idioms of modern American English, few are as puzzling to unpack as the expression "the whole nine yards," meaning 'the full extent of something.' Though it is of relatively recent vintage, etymologists have yet to discover a credible historical explanation for what the "nine yards" might refer to — there are a multitude of theories, some quite fanciful, but none are supported by documentary evidence. In the past few years, however, some significant progress has been made to unearth early examples of the idiom, which may eventually help to smoke out where those "nine yards" originally came from.Continue reading...
American sports fans are currently engrossed in the NCAA College Basketball Tournament, a.k.a. "March Madness." Even President Obama filled out a Tournament bracket with his projected winners in the single-elimination format. So far, if you picked the favorites to advance (as Obama mostly did), your bracket is doing nicely: only one team (Arizona) has pulled off a significant upset to get into the "Sweet Sixteen." In betting parlance, chalk has predominated in the Tournament. But how did chalk come to be the term associated with favored teams?Continue reading...