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The untimely passing of Tim Russert, host of NBC's Meet the Press, has led many to reminisce about his lasting influence on political reporting. Some obituaries mentioned that Russert has been credited with popularizing the terms "red state" and "blue state," to refer to states favoring Republican or Democratic candidates. Though Russert's memorable analysis of the twists and turns of the 2000 presidential election no doubt played a significant role in popularizing the "red/blue state" designations, the history of the color coding is surprisingly complicated.
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The word said has an elegant, indispensable simplicity. It's a mainstay of the journalist's art: "Five out of five editors find the noun form of the word 'overwhelm,' currently in vogue among the nation's life coaches, completely unacceptable," said Dr. Carla Ridge, founder of SSOUON (the Society to Stamp Out the Use of Overwhelm as a Noun). And in that context, exclusive use of "said" is appropriate and welcome.
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Two years ago, the International Astronomical Union voted to demote Pluto from planetary status, deciding that it was only a "dwarf planet." There was great uproar among fans of Pluto, even spawning a group calling themselves The Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet. The IAU held firm to its decision, though, and moved on to other nomenclatural issues. A term was needed to encompass Pluto and all Pluto-like objects on the fringes of the solar system out beyond Neptune. This week the IAU finally came up with an official term: plutoid. It's not the prettiest word, but it does the trick.
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Without Peter Mark Roget, there would be no Visual Thesaurus — or any modern thesaurus for that matter. We now take it for granted, but it took a special type of mind to come up with a system for organizing and classifying words and their meanings, in a way that also organizes human knowledge itself. Roget, a nineteenth-century polymath who wrote treatises on everything from physiology to slide rules, certainly had the mind for it. But he also had a deeply troubled personal life, surrounded by mental illness and heartbreaking tragedy. Joshua Kendall has written a fitting tribute to this fascinating figure in his new biography, The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus. We got to talk to Josh about the making of the book, and learned how his previous writing about psychology turned out to be an excellent preparation for exploring Roget's intricate mental world. Here is part one of our interview.
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