With Ryan's Ascent, A Few Thoughts On 'Entitlement'
People are saying that Mitt Romney's selection of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate creates an opportunity to hold what Ryan likes to call an "adult conversation" about entitlement spending....
View ArticleWhen Words Were Worth Fighting Over
I have a quibble with the title of David Skinner's new book, The Story of Ain't. In fact, that pariah contraction plays only a supporting role in the story. The book is really an account of one of the...
View ArticleOne Debate, Two Very Different Conversations
When you consider how carefully staged and planned the debates are and how long they've been around, it's remarkable how often candidates manage to screw them up. Sometimes they're undone by a simple...
View ArticleEven Americans Find Some Britishisms 'Spot On'
Mitt Romney was on CNN not long ago defending the claims in his campaign ads — "We've been absolutely spot on," he said. Politics aside, the expression had me doing an audible roll of my eyes. I've...
View ArticleGeoff Nunberg's Word Of The Year: Big Data
"Big Data" hasn't made any of the words-of-the-year lists I've seen so far. That's probably because it didn't get the wide public exposure given to items like "frankenstorm,""fiscal cliff" and YOLO.
View Article'The Whole Nine Yards' Of What?
Where does the phrase "the whole nine yards" come from? In 1982, William Safire called that "one of the great etymological mysteries of our time."He thought the phrase originally referred to the...
View ArticleHistorical Vocab: When We Get It Wrong, Does It Matter?
Has there ever been an age that was so grudging about suspending its disbelief? The groundlings at the Globe Theatre didn't giggle when Shakespeare had a clock chime in Julius Caesar. The Victorians...
View ArticleEven Dictionaries Grapple With Getting 'Marriage' Right
It's a funny thing about dictionaries. First we're taught to revere them, then we have to learn to set them aside. Nobody ever went wrong starting a middle-school composition with, "According to...
View Article'Horrific' And 'Surreal': The Words We Use To Bear Witness
Mass shootings, bus crashes, tornadoes, terrorist attacks — we've gotten adept at talking about these things. Act of God or act of man, they're all horrific. At least that was the word you kept hearing...
View ArticleCalling It 'Metadata' Doesn't Make Surveillance Less Intrusive
"This is just metadata. There is no content involved." That was how Sen. Dianne Feinstein defended the NSA's blanket surveillance of Americans' phone records and Internet activity. Before those...
View ArticleBracing For Google Glass: An In-Your-Face Technology
The likes of you and I can't buy Google Glass yet. It's available only to the select developers and opinion-makers who have been permitted to spring $1,500 for the privilege of having the first one on...
View ArticleThe Internet's 'Twerk' Effect Makes Dictionaries Less Complete
Evidently it was quite fortuitous. Just a couple of days after MTV's Video Music Awards, Oxford Dictionaries Online released its quarterly list of the new words it was adding. To the delight of the...
View ArticleWas Rand Paul's Plagiarism Dishonest Or A Breach Of Good Form?
Even taken together, the charges didn't seem to amount to that big a deal — just a matter of quoting a few factual statements and a Wikipedia passage without attributing them. But as Rand Paul...
View ArticleNarcissistic Or Not, 'Selfie' Is Nunberg's Word Of The Year
I feel a little defensive about choosing "selfie" as my Word of the Year for 2013. I've usually been partial to words that encapsulate one of the year's major stories, such as "occupy" or "big data."...
View ArticleSorry Assiduous (adj.) SAT-Takers, Linguist In Dudgeon (n.) Over Vocab...
When I took the SATs a very long time ago, it didn't occur to us to cram for the vocabulary questions. Back then, the A in SAT still stood for "aptitude," and most people accepted the wholesome fiction...
View ArticleHackers? Techies? What To Call San Francisco's Newcomers
"There goes the neighborhood." Every so often that cry goes up in San Francisco, announcing a new chapter in American cultural history, as the rest of the country looks on. There were the beats in...
View Article150 Years After Marx, 'Capital' Still Can't Shake Loose Of 'Das Kapital'
A lot of things had to come together to turn Thomas Piketty's controversial Capital in the Twenty-First Century into the tome of the season. There's its timeliness, its surprising accessibility and the...
View ArticleDo Feelings Compute? If Not, The Turing Test Doesn't Mean Much
To judge from some of the headlines, it was a very big deal. At an event held at the Royal Society in London, for the first time ever, a computer passed the Turing Test, which is widely taken as the...
View ArticleFeeling Watched? 'God View' Is Geoff Nunberg's Word Of The Year
"Infobesity,""lumbersexual,""phablet." As usual, the items that stand out as candidates for word of the year are like its biggest pop songs, catchy but ephemeral. But even a fleeting expression can...
View ArticleDon't You Dare Use 'Comprised Of' On Wikipedia: One Editor Will Take It Out
I think of English usage as one of those subjects like cocktails or the British royal family. A lot of people take a passing interest in it but you never know who's going to turn out to be a true...
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