I’d like to extend a personal invitation to Mr. Ben Zimmer to join me under my rock so we can discuss words, their definitions, and their importance. Zimmer is the executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, an online thesaurus that uses a mapping concept to show the relationships among words.
In addition, he succeeded William Safire as the “On Language” columnist for The New York Times. After Safire’s death in 2009, I secretly bemoaned that there wasn’t anybody out there who could cut through the piteous prose that often passes as professional writing. When I got stuck with some grammar item, I muttered under my breath, “Where is Safire when I need him?”
But I’ve followed Mr. Zimmer for a while now, and I believe he is a most able successor. A column he wrote today talks about how the word downgrade has “taken on powerful significance, to the point that it has vaulted into contention for Word of the Year.”
Word of the Year, you say? Is that like the Academy Awards or the Emmys or the Cleos, recognizing the best in its class for a given time period? Not exactly. The word isn’t always the best; for lack of a better explanation, it’s the one word that most closely typifies the grammatical focus of our country at any given time.
Some of the words that were recently honored are subprime (2007), bailout (2008), tweet (2009), and app (2010). And if frequency is a criterion of the Word of the Year, then downgrade has been upgraded to first place.
Not a lot of people in the general population seem to care about this; but, Mr. Zimmer, if you read this just know I’m glad you’re here when I need you.
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