Wordorigins.org

Wordorigins.org is devoted to the origins of words and phrases, or as a linguist would put it, to etymology. Etymology is the study of word origins. (It is not the study of insects; that is entomology.) Where words come from is a fascinating subject, full of folklore and historical lessons. Often, popular tales of a word’s origin arise. Sometimes these are true; more often they are not. While it can be disappointing when a neat little tale turns out to be untrue, almost invariably the true origin is just as interesting.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 256 words with first citations from 1975. In that year, you could get a set-top box that played Betamax videotapes; Page Three girls were nobody’s idea of womyn; computer scientist brainiacs played with fractals, Phong shaders, and wetware; and CAT scans revolutionized medicine, while Reiki began to scam sick people.

Not a bad article, but it’s hardly news. The obsession with acronyms in the U. S. capital has been around for decades and decades.

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This blog post is a week old, but it’s not time sensitive.

While the particulars may be a bit different, this sounds like every single place I have ever worked. As to the degree requirement, with most jobs I’ve discovered that what a person majored in is completely irrelevant. If your studies prepped you with particular knowledge, that will be obsolete or forgotten in a few years anyway. What’s more important is the ability to think critically, to write well, and the ability to learn quickly as you do the job.

Tip o’ the hat to Erin McKean.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 222 words with first citations from 1974. In that year,we saw calls for slow food and Trumanesque politicians; banoffi pies and carpaccio were on the menu, but if you ate too fast the guys in the ambo could give you the Heimlich maneuver; people feared what the Moonies and Dungeons and Dragons were doing to the youth; and Sensurround and teletext hit the big and small screens.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 264 words with first citations from 1973. In that year, Derridean critics were deconstructing literature through intertextual readings; a lot of people were weirded out by est; members of the Symbionese Liberation Army and other cultic groups were deprogrammed; techies were playing with diskettes, Unix, grep, and FTPing; and linguists started talking about Ebonics.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 281 words with first citations from 1972. In that year, Hispanics and Latinas showcased America’s ethnic diversity; pre-loved was a cringe-inducing euphemism; blaxploitation films were big in the movie theaters, while small-screen comedy moved into the Pythonesque; high-tech weapons like Tasers started to appear; and some employees of the White House were arrested breaking into the Watergate.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 333 words with first citations from 1971. In that year, phreaks could use blue boxes to get toll-free calls without an 800 number; Deadheads started bringing lightsticks to concerts; addicts jonesed for a superfly fix; and techies played with motherboards and daemons.

I missed this a few days ago, but Timothy Egan has a thought-provoking piece in the New York Times on e-books and the future of publishing.

E-books, and the way they are currently produced and distributed, are not an unalloyed good. They have their drawbacks, but Egan’s main thrust is quite correct. The doomsayers who evoke the specter of a coming cultural wastelands are flat out wrong. There is this:

In their annual report last August, the Association of American Publishers reported that overall revenues, and number of books sold in all formats, were up sizably in three years since 2008. Without e-books, the numbers would have been flat, or declined.

One-fifth of all American adults reported reading an e-book in the past year, according to an optimistic report from the Pew Center. And those digital consumers read far more books on average—about 24 a year—than the dead-tree consumers.

Another surprise: e-book readers also buy lots of paper books. The buyers of digital tomes “read more books in all formats,” Pew reported.

And Egan also notes the resurgence of independent bookstores.

The lesson here is not to confuse the business model with the thing itself. The traditional business model used by publishers is doomed, not publishing itself.

[Tip ‘o the Hat: Andrew Sullivan]

The Oxford English Dictionary has 344 words with first citations from 1970. In that year, while the counter-culture was busy getting its ya-yas out, police on power trips were resorting to pepper gas; Reaganomics was sweeping California while liberation theology reigned in Latin America; corporate America introduced the Amex card and the Big Mac; in Vietnam, scared newbies were fragging their officers; and the strains of funkadelic and punk rock music began to compete over the radio airwaves.