Visit Barbara Wallraff’s blog, at barbarawallraff .theatlantic.com, to see more commentary on language and to submit Word Fugitive queries and words that meet David K. Prince’s need. Readers whose queries are published and those who take top honors will receive an autographed copy of Wallraff’s most recent book, Word Fugitives. More
Barbara Wallraff, a contributing editor and columnist for The Atlantic, has worked for the magazine for 25 years. She is also a weekly syndicated newspaper columnist for King Features and the author of Word Fugitives (2006), Your Own Words (2004), and the national best-seller Word Court (2000). Her writing about language has appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Wilson Quarterly, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Magazine.
Wallraff has been an invited speaker at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the National Writers Workshop, the Nieman Foundation, Columbia Journalism School, the British Institute Library of Florence, and national or international conventions of the American Copy Editors Society, the Council of Science Editors, the International Education of Students organization, and the Journalism Education Association. She has been interviewed about language on the Nightly News With Tom Brokaw and dozens of radio programs including Fresh Air, The Diane Rehm Show, and All Things Considered. National Public Radio's Morning Edition once commissioned her to copy edit the U.S. Constitution. She is a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel. The Genus V edition of the game Trivial Pursuit contains a question about Wallraff and her Word Court column.
... that belong on our (increasingly comprehensive) "Never Would be Soon Enough" list:When this is all over, certain half-dead words will need to be put out of their misery with a quick bullet to the back of the head. My candidates for a mercy verbicide: pivot, tank, cave, pushback, gravitas, message, game-changer,challenges, the entire litany of Palinesque nouns, attack dog, battleground,pork-barrel, earmark, impacting, and impactful. Other words… More »
Over the past couple of days I've had a chance to see the Oxford English Corpus in action, and I'm really impressed. Covetous. The thing contains 2 billion words of text (and counting), making it by far the largest linguistic corpus in existence. All of the sources are 21st-century, and every passage is meticulously tagged as to whether it's British, American, Canadian, Australian, etc., and whether it's from news, fiction, blogs, online chat rooms, medical… More »
Written yesterday: I'm on the plane to London, reading a review copy of a book with the - I have to say - unappealing title A Damp Squid. (Thereby hangs a tale, of course, which you can read when the book is published, in December.) It contains a lot of thought-provoking stuff about how dictionaries - in particular, the OED - are now made and what else we can learn from the tools that lexicographers use to make them. Case in point: "collocates," words that go… More »
Andrew Sullivan has an entry about "s/he," or, really, the singular "they" with a collegial link that I'll gladly take as an invitation to weigh in on the subject: Man (emoticon goes here), do writers and copy editors wish the singular "they" were standard! It's not, yet, but here's why it would be handy if it were: Write "he" about a nonspecific person and you're a sexist. Write "she" and you're a flaming feminist. Write "he or she" and you're a pedant. Write… More »
Sorry not to be chattier -- yet. I've been busy getting ready to leave tomorrow for Merrie Olde England, to attend a celebration in honor of the Oxford English Dictionary's 80th anniversary. (I can hardly believe that the OED is only 80 years old!) For now, three things to say: I'm looking forward to the celebration and to reporting on it here.As you know, I'm new to blogging, so I don't know whether I'm going to be sorry for the following. (Please don't be the… More »
A few phrases, like "that one" and "lipstick on a pig," achieved instant notoriety in the current election season after one of the candidates said them once and everybody pounced. But others seem to come up again and again just because somebody can't stop himself or herself or themselves. Here's a short list of words and phrases of this latter kind. I, for one, would be grateful not to hear or read any of these again until 2009, or 2012 -- or ever: a heartbeat… More »
Let's test the new word-fugitive delivery system. I've already received suggestions for the October word fugitive (below) by the old-fashioned route. But more are more than welcome, so feel free to post your word inventions as comments. Anything that appears here will be considered for inclusion in my write-up in the magazine. Except, please send requests for new words to me directly, by way of the Word Fugitives form.Michael McWatters, of New York City, writes, "I… More »
This blog, besides being a soapbox for me, gives those of you who are Word Fugitives enthusiasts a place to post your word inventions where other readers can admire them. You'll be able to see what others have come up with, too. (If you're shy, you don't have to post publicly - use the form at the upper right. BTW, please don't post Fugitives requests in the comments section if you hope to see them published in the magazine. Use the form.)There has never been… More »
