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Just in time for Sunday's season premiere of "Mad Men," my latest "On Language" column in The New York Times Magazine considers how authentically the show represents the speech of the 1960s. The creators of the AMC series, led by head honcho Matthew Weiner, are obsessive about getting the details of language right, just like all the other details of the show. But fans can be equally obsessive, on the lookout for the smallest linguistic anachronisms.
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Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, writes:
Recently on the Copyediting blog, I made a comment about Flag Day, saying we celebrated it rather than observed it. This was actually a follow-up to an earlier comment about Memorial Day, when I noted that it was to be observed rather than celebrated.
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The blogosphere has been abuzz over Sarah Palin's use of the word refudiate in a Twitter update, apparently mashing up refute and repudiate. Now OUPblog, the official blog of Oxford University Press, weighs in. "Refudiate this, word snobs!" chortles OUP lexicographer Christine Lindberg. Read all about it here.
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The new film The Kids Are All Right, directed by Lisa Cholodenko, owes an obvious debt of gratitude to The Who, even though the band's music doesn't appear on the soundtrack. The title is lifted from a classic song from The Who's 1965 debut album, which also served as the title of a 1979 documentary about the band. Discerning readers will notice a small but important difference: the song and the documentary were spelled "The Kids Are Alright." Did Cholodenko "correct" The Who's spelling?
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A great voice was silenced earlier this week with the death of Bob Sheppard, longtime public-address announcer for New York Yankees baseball games and New York Giants football games. Sheppard, who also worked as a speech teacher at the high school and college level in New York, had such a memorable way of announcing players' names that he was fondly known as "the voice of God."
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The latest quarterly update of the Oxford English Dictionary's online revision project covers the alphabetical range Rh to rococoesque, and it includes a fascinatingly complex entry for a seemingly simple word: rock, used as a verb. From the rocking of cradles in Old English sources to the rocking of microphones in rap lyrics, this entry has it all.
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