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By: Stephanie,
on 2/6/2008
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By Anatoly Liberman
This is a story of the naked but not necessarily the dead. Traveling through time, we notice the same grim custom: a defeated enemy or a prisoner of war may be killed or stripped of everything he wears before (and sometimes instead of) being murdered. Reports gloat over the details. Marauders search for good clothes and valuables on the battlefield and care little for the indignity with which they are treating corpses, but it was the ability to humiliate the survivors that gave the greatest joy to the winning party. The shame of being left naked clung to the victim forever, and it was worse than death. With amazing regularity the languages of the world show that the similarity between robber and robe is not fortuitous, that those words are indeed related. (more…)
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By: Ben Zimmer,
on 9/20/2007
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Today’s an exciting day for OUP, as we launch the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. If this were a birth announcement, we’d have to give the vitals: Oxford University Press joyfully announces the arrival of twin volumes, weighing a total of 13.6 pounds (6.2 kilograms), with 3,800 pages, 6 million words of text, more than half a million definitions, and 84,000 illustrative quotations. Welcome to the world, Shorter volumes 1 and 2! (Oh, and your diminutive friend too, the Shorter on CD-ROM.) (more…)
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By: Ben Zimmer,
on 8/2/2007
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Erin McKean, who is OUP’s chief consulting editor for American dictionaries when she’s not busy being “America’s lexicographical sweetheart,” filled in this past Sunday for a vacationing William Safire, devoting the New York Times Magazine’s “On Language” column to a subject that should be familiar to readers of this column: the Oxford English Corpus and the fascinating things that it tells us about our changing language. (more…)
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By: Ben Zimmer,
on 6/28/2007
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Rebecca OUP-US
Today we are proud to present Ben Zimmer’s first installment in his new column, From A To Zimmer. To read more about the column click here.
When I told friends that I was taking a job as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press, I started getting emails asking, “So how do I get a word in the dictionary?” One college friend, who’s now a pediatrics professor researching the effects of smoking on children, had a specific term that he thought deserved recognition: thirdhand smoke, used to refer to residual tobacco smoke contamination that lingers after a cigarette is extinguished. I had never heard of thirdhand smoke, but it turns out it’s gotten some press attention due to recent research indicating what a serious danger smoke residue poses to infants. (more…)
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By Anatoly Liberman
Many thanks to our correspondents for questions and comments. First, the future of my etymological dictionary. Work on the dictionary and a bibliography of English etymology is going well, with occasional unexpected but pleasant complications. At the moment, I am mostly interested in words beginning with the letter B, but one day, while reading an old book on Dutch etymology, I understood where Engl. yeoman came from. I am sorry that yeoman begins with the second letter from the end rather than from the beginning of the alphabet, but the way of research are unpredictable: one often has to enjoy the dessert before an appetizer.
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