Last week we featured a debate over contemporary usage of whom, with Baltimore Sun copy editor John McIntyre squaring off against Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky. To be honest, the exchange was a bit too civil and reasonable to live up to its billing as a "usage showdown" — at least based on the Visual Thesaurus definition of showdown as "a hostile disagreement face-to-face." I was amused to see that on his copy-editing blog, "You Don't Say," John McIntyre facetiously referred to the debate with an even more inappropriate term: smackdown, which most people (in the U.S. at least) would associate with professional wrestling. Other violent confrontations ending in -down include beatdown and throwdown. And where do hoedowns fit into all of this?  Continue reading...

It's hard to keep up with techie terms these days. Last week, Apple Inc. announced it would no longer use the word push to describe the way that its new online MobileMe service communicates to personal computers and electronic devices like the iPhone. Turns out the service wasn't always "pushing" data to "the cloud" as quickly as users were expecting. To which non-technophiles would probably say, "Huh?"  Continue reading...

For today's installment of Mailbag Friday, our question comes from VT subscriber Barry Francolino in Romania. (One of our many far-flung correspondents!) Barry writes, "Just interested to know where the word/phrase/idea pipe dream comes from." The definition given by the Visual Thesaurus, "a fantastic but vain hope (from fantasies induced by the opium pipe)," gives a whiff of its origin.  Continue reading...

Last Friday I was delighted to be a return guest on the Wisconsin Public Radio Show "At Issue with Ben Merens" (audio available here). Our ostensible topic was "words of the summer" (including skadoosh, of course!), but once we started taking calls from listeners, the floor was open to any topic of interest to word-savvy Wisconsinites. Much like what happened when I was on the show last December, conversation turned to perceived "gaps" in the English language that callers thought should be filled with new coinages. This time around, Robert from Coloma expressed dissatisfaction with the words boyfriend and girlfriend, suggesting a new word to cover both: inti-mate.  Continue reading...

If there's one word that captures the zeitgeist of our current economic downturn, it's subprime. The American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Year for 2007, and as I described in my last column it is among the new entries in the latest updates of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. But it's a pretty odd word when you stop to think about it. The newly announced Merriam-Webster definition reads as follows: "having or being an interest rate that is higher than a prime rate and is extended especially to low-income borrowers." Wait a minute: a loan with a rate that is higher than prime is called sub-prime? How did that happen?  Continue reading...

Dictionary publishers don't get too many opportunities for creating PR buzz, but one surefire way of getting some attention is to announce the new words (and new senses of old words) that have been added in the latest update to a particular dictionary. In the past few days there have been new-word announcements for two major dictionaries, one in the US and one in the UK: Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition) and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (also in its 11th edition, coincidentally enough). Let's take a look at what they're adding.  Continue reading...

Welcome to the latest installment of Mailbag Friday, our new feature for answering readers' questions about word origins. For this special Fourth of July edition, we have a very timely query from Jason B. from Wilmington, DE. "I've heard a lot of stories about the origin of 'hot dog.' What's the frank truth? I await your answer with relish."  Continue reading...