Of Pigs and Silk and Lipstick

Mailbag Friday: "(Over)whelmed"

Don't Be Eristic, Be Lapidary!

Going Quant, Going Rogue
When I read in the New York Times recently that everyone is going quant in "the Age of Metrics," my first thought was, "Is that anything like Sarah Palin going rogue?" What's going on with these new ways of going, anyhow?

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year: "Admonish"
The latest selection for 2009 Word of the Year comes from the good people at Merriam-Webster. Unlike other dictionary publishers that anoint an annual word, Merriam-Webster bases its winner and runners-up on actual user lookups to its online dictionary and thesaurus. So instead of the novelties selected by its competitors (distracted driving from Webster's New World, unfriend from New Oxford American), Merriam-Webster's choice is an old word that worked its way into current events: admonish.

NOAD Word of the Year: "Unfriend"
The New Oxford American Dictionary has announced its Word of the Year (http://blog.oup.com/2009/11/unfriend/) for 2009: it's unfriend, defined as "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook." Readers of this space will be quite familiar with the term, as I discussed it along with similar un-verbs on Word Routes in May (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/1845/) and then again in September (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/1993/) as a followup to my On Language column in the New York Times Magazine, "The Age of Undoing (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20FOB-onlanguage-t.html)." It's nice to feel ahead of the curve on this one,

Happy Web Day!
November 12th isn't a public holiday, but perhaps it should be. On this day in 1990, a memorandum was produced by the English physicist Tim Berners-Lee and the Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau while working for CERN in Geneva. Entitled "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project," it might not have seemed so earth-shattering at the time. But it set into motion the Age of the Web: it's hard to overestimate the impact this document has had on our chronically wired culture — and on our language.

It's Cadillac Time!
In this Sunday's "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/magazine/08FOB-onlanguage-t.html), I take a look at how the car brand Cadillac remains an emblem of luxury, even though Cadillac itself is no longer really "the Cadillac of cars." In the health care debate on Capitol Hill, we frequently hear high-cost health insurance plans described as "Cadillac plans." And there's another area of American culture where Cadillac continues to have outsized linguistic importance: baseball.