An American At Oxford
"Money missionary," Kevin Cross, talks to families in Roswell, Georgia about their finances. / CBS News
Jesse Sheidlower waxes poetic about a subject close to his heart: words. He recently exchanged emails with CBSNews.com's Marjorie Backman.
Any insights about how the Internet changed language or English in particular?
The most important effect of the Internet is that it is fostering a huge increase in the amount of written communication people are engaged in. Some critics have complained that on the Internet everyone is writing sloppily, but that misses the point, which is that people are indeed writing to communicate.
What word did you research today?
This morning I wrote up an entry for mellow, as a noun, meaning "a state of relaxation," including the phrase "to harsh one's mellow." This is bound to be my favorite entry of the week.
What are your favorite Web sites?
I started and for many years ran the Word of the Day site at Random House. Any entry earlier than October '99 is written by me; it's now written by a team but it's still a good site.
Other favorites:
Word Detective
World Wide Words
Wilton's Word & Phrase Origins
What are some unusual types of reading material you use to research words?
I am personally interested in slang, so I look at (or ask our volunteers to look at) a variety of obscure sources that I think might contain unusual vocabulary.
We've looked at the letters of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs; I recently went through an unpublished collection of student slang collected at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 1970s and '80s; one of my readers is working on the Yellow Kid, a comic strip that ran at the turn of the century; and we've just gone through the autobiographies of the singer Marilyn Manson and the pro wrestler Mick "Mankind" Foley.
What inspired you to write The F- Word? Is it because a lot of slang words have sexual connotations?
No, not at all, in fact the opposite is true. While almost any nonmedical word for sex would be regarded as "slang," if you look through carefully compiled slang dictionaries, you'll see that a relatively small proportion of the material is sexual.
I had been involved with a project that devoted a great deal of research to the F-word, and I realized that there was a tremendous amount of material available on it. This is a word that goes back over 500 years, and exists in a wide variety of compounds, phrases, and euphemisms. People tend to make jokes about it; you can buy T-shirts that list different parts of speech, but in fact there's a lot of real information out there that no one had access to.
We published The F-Word to provide a detailed history of all the usages of the word throughout the enturies. It's a thorough, scholarly book that also happens to be a lot of fun to read.
Copyright 2009 CBS. All rights reserved. Any insights about how the Internet changed language or English in particular?
The most important effect of the Internet is that it is fostering a huge increase in the amount of written communication people are engaged in. Some critics have complained that on the Internet everyone is writing sloppily, but that misses the point, which is that people are indeed writing to communicate.
What word did you research today?
This morning I wrote up an entry for mellow, as a noun, meaning "a state of relaxation," including the phrase "to harsh one's mellow." This is bound to be my favorite entry of the week.
What are your favorite Web sites?
I started and for many years ran the Word of the Day site at Random House. Any entry earlier than October '99 is written by me; it's now written by a team but it's still a good site.
Other favorites:
Word Detective
World Wide Words
Wilton's Word & Phrase Origins
What are some unusual types of reading material you use to research words?
I am personally interested in slang, so I look at (or ask our volunteers to look at) a variety of obscure sources that I think might contain unusual vocabulary.
We've looked at the letters of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs; I recently went through an unpublished collection of student slang collected at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 1970s and '80s; one of my readers is working on the Yellow Kid, a comic strip that ran at the turn of the century; and we've just gone through the autobiographies of the singer Marilyn Manson and the pro wrestler Mick "Mankind" Foley.
What inspired you to write The F- Word? Is it because a lot of slang words have sexual connotations?
No, not at all, in fact the opposite is true. While almost any nonmedical word for sex would be regarded as "slang," if you look through carefully compiled slang dictionaries, you'll see that a relatively small proportion of the material is sexual.
I had been involved with a project that devoted a great deal of research to the F-word, and I realized that there was a tremendous amount of material available on it. This is a word that goes back over 500 years, and exists in a wide variety of compounds, phrases, and euphemisms. People tend to make jokes about it; you can buy T-shirts that list different parts of speech, but in fact there's a lot of real information out there that no one had access to.
We published The F-Word to provide a detailed history of all the usages of the word throughout the enturies. It's a thorough, scholarly book that also happens to be a lot of fun to read.
