Zimmer on the Zuckerverb

30 September 2011

Ben Zimmer talks about the “new language of Facebook” in The Atlantic today. You can also hear Zimmer talk about it on WCBS radio.

Zimmer gives some trenchant analysis of what Facebook is doing, while avoiding the doom-and-gloom “the English language is going to hell” commentary that is so often heard:

This is what happens when language is optimized for social data-mining rather than natural communication. “Mark read a book.” “Mark listened to a song.” “Mark hiked a trail.” “Mark reviewed a movie.” The sentences flashed on the big screen behind Zuckerberg as he laid out his verb-y vision. Though these sentences are technically in the active voice, they present us with an oddly cramped kind of “activeness,” in which we the users engage with a world of commodified objects through verbs of consumption. And to see one’s “life story” reduced to a series of such prefab activities in a personal timeline? Some might call that the apotheosis of consumer culture.

It’s well worth a read.

Words of 1815

1 September 2011

As you undoubtedly know, I’ve been compiling lists of new words for each year of the past century. But novelist Mary Robinette Kowal has done something similar for words from 1815. She’s writing a period novel and wants to keep it free of linguistic anachronisms. Kowal describes her process:

I decided to create a Jane Austen word list, from the complete works of Jane Austen, and use that as my spellcheck dictionary. It flagged any word that she didn’t use, which allowed me to look it up to see if it existed. Sometimes the word did, but meant something different. [...] Once the word was flagged, I looked it up in the OED to double-check the meaning and the earliest citation.  If the word didn’t work, then I used the OED’s historical thesaurus to find a period appropriate synonym. If that wasn’t yielding good results, I would also, sometimes, search in the complete works of Jane Austen to see how she referred to similar subjects.

In a few cases, she decided to keep anachronistic words for artistic or style reasons.

Kowal’s method is an excellent one. It is not doctrinaire, she makes exceptions where it is sensible to do so. She recognizes that words change in meaning. Presumably she shows some flexibility in the date, so a word that appears in the OED from 1817 is probably okay for use in an 1815 setting. Of course, her method will not flag a word that Austen used but has changed in meaning, so it’s not fail-safe. But no single method for eliminating anachronisms is going to be perfect. This is smart use of a dictionary.

Kowal’s blog post contains a list of words she pulled from her latest novel because they were anachronistic, and it contains a link to her Jane Austen word list. They are both well worth a peek.

(Hat tip to Languagehat)

More on False Quotations

30 August 2011

A New York Times op-ed on the subject.

I would go one step further than Mr. Morton, who wrote the NYT piece. The tendency is not limited to bumper stickers, coffee mugs, and t-shirts. Whenever you see a quote attributed to a famous person that is not accompanied by a reference to the date and specific speech or book/article in which it appears, assume that someone made it up and assigned the famous person’s name to it. The assumption will be right more often than it will be wrong.

I believe I’ve mentioned the site before, but The Quote Investigator is an excellent resource.