In one of the final press briefings from the Bush White House, counselor to the president Ed Gillespie used some peculiar wording yesterday to describe the current mood of his boss:

You know, I would say that he's gotten a little more winsome. I remember somebody asking me back in, like, September, you know, things must be — things must be getting winsome. And I thought, you know, those of us who work here wish it were a little more winsome sometimes.

Say what?  Continue reading...

Greetings, everyone! I've just come back from San Francisco, where I attended the American Dialect Society's annual meeting (held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America). As is the custom, the linguists and lexicographers in attendance took a break from their scholarly presentations to have some fun selecting the Word of the Year for 2008. This time around, bailout emerged as a powerful frontrunner, and sure enough it ultimately proved to be the winner.  Continue reading...

The countdown is on for the American Dialect Society's selection for 2008 Word of the Year, the oldest and most prestigious WOTY event in the land. The ADS selection will happen Friday, January 9, at the group's annual meeting, held this year in San Francisco. The voting is open to the public, so Visual Thesaurus readers in the Bay area are welcome to drop in for the WOTY fun. I'll be attending (I'm on the ADS Executive Council), and I have a few favorites I'll be lobbying for. One of them is a word that offers a ray of light in our current moment of economic doom and gloom: shovel-ready.  Continue reading...

A New York Times article yesterday about Google Book Search features some research I did on the petulant phrase "You're not the boss of me!" This is an expression that many people suppose is rather recent — some might have first come across it in the past five or ten years, while others might fancy that this bit of kid-speak is restricted to their own family usage. But using Google Book Search, it's easy to find examples all the way back to 1883.  Continue reading...

If you've been keeping up with the news about the Obama transition, you might have noticed an awful lot of "czar" talk. From "health czar" to "climate czar" to "urban affairs czar" to "technology czar" to "copyright czar," it seems like there's a czarship for every policy area in the new administration. And even though the proposal for a "car czar" stalled on Capitol Hill, expect that pirate-friendly rhyme to make headlines again in 2009.  Continue reading...

My mention earlier this week of the word gerrymander (after Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, blamed for the tortuous redistricting in his state in 1812) inspired some free association. One commenter posited a connection to the jerry of jerry-built ("shoddy; of inferior workmanship and materials"), though it turns out that word only shows up about half a century after Gerry first gerrymandered. Jerry-built, in turn, led another reader to wonder, "What about jerry-rigged? I've heard that it's really supposed to be jury-rigged."  Continue reading...

Every now and then, a prominent person achieves so much notoriety that his or her name enters the language as an eponym. Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry gave us gerrymander, after carving a salamander-shaped electoral district that favored his party in 1812. Major Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian officer who collaborated with the Germans during World War II, so quisling came to mean "a traitor to one's country." And when Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court was quashed in 1987, it was said that he got Borked by his opponents. Now there are a couple of names in the news that just might lend themselves to new eponyms.  Continue reading...