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If you watched the Oscars on Sunday, like many other viewers you were probably left scratching your head when, after "Music by Prudence" won for Best Documentary Short, there was a struggle for the microphone between two of the film's creators. Elinor Burkett snatched the microphone from Roger Ross Williams, in what was almost immediately dubbed a "Kanye moment." Or you could say Burkett "pulled a Kanye," or that Williams simply got "Kanye'd."
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One of the frontrunners for Best Picture in Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony is Kathryn Bigelow's tense depiction of a U.S. bomb squad unit in Iraq, The Hurt Locker. The movie's official website says of the title, "In Iraq, it is soldier vernacular to speak of explosions as sending you to 'the hurt locker.'" In fact, like so much American military slang, hurt locker (along with related hurt expressions) dates back to the Vietnam War.
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When you obsess about words as much as I do, it's hard to pick a favorite. It's like Batman picking his favorite criminal lowlife. How do you choose between the Joker, Two Face, the Penguin, and the scum who killed your parents? It's just too painful.
But what the heck, here's a good candidate, and it's also exhibit Q in the case of why I love the Dictionary of American Regional English: peedoodle.
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An oft-heard word of the Winter Olympics is podium, the raised platform where medalists stand. As I wrote about recently for The New York Times Magazine, during the Olympics podium even gets used as a verb, as in "The Canadian alpine skiers failed to podium." The verbing of podium bothers a lot of people, but the noun presents problems too. Away from the Olympics, podium often gets conflated with another word, lectern.
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March 3, 2010
