Affect, Esurient, Bush and Perseverence (Perserverence? Perseverance? hmmm)

Year-end tributes to popular words and neologisms continue with this press release from Dictionary.com: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dictionarycom-reveals-its-top-searched-words-of-2009-78208067.html. Listing the words that its users most often looked up in 2009, as well as gainers, losers and most often misspelled words, the release suggests that these searches reflect "insights and trends." My graduate students, however, point out that searches often reflect classroom assignments ("Don't ask me how to spell the word, Jimmy, look it up!").

So what are elementary school students studying these days? Monty Python's Flying Circus? Ben Zimmer's commentary today on the Visual Thesaurus (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/) includes a gratifying link to the Cheese Shop sketch--which, he notes, is the only reason most of us know the word "esurient" in the first place.

New edition of "The F Word"

The new Oxford University Press edition of Jesse Sheidlower's The F Word is getting a fair amount of play in the media. Here's a link Inside Higher Ed's interview: http://tinyurl.com/yc3m8s6.
At the same time, Jesse Sheidlower's 1 October 2009 article on "Why its so hard to put sex in the dictionary" has the blogs buzzing. The (very graphic!) article is on Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2227971/.

1,000,000th word foofarah

Well, I wasn't going to post about the supposed milestone, but as the Newspaper of Record quotes some of our members, here's a link to the article from today's New York Times' Week in Review section (is it a section if you access it online? Today I read the paper copy). I'm actually more interested in which library of dictionaries has been used for the illustration. Does anyone recognize it? Visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/weekinreview/14shuessler.html.

Webster's New World® College Dictionary Chooses "Overshare" as the 2008 Word of the Year

For the rest of the press release, visit http://tinyurl.com/65ebv4.

LB

Merriam Webster Word of the Year 2008: BAILOUT

Merriam-Webster Inc., America's leading language reference publisher, has announced the year's top ten words and definitions as culled from its popular Web site Merriam-Webster OnLine ( www.Merriam-Webster.com). For the rest of the article, visit http://tinyurl.com/57kyu8.

LB