English Language FAQ

Ground zero is the point closest to the centre of an explosion. It was first used by the Manhatten Project when planning the nuclear bombing raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a news report from Hiroshima in 1946 as 'that part of the ground situated immediately under an exploding bomb, especially an atomic one.". In recent years 'Ground Zero' has become synonymous in the public mind with 9/11 and the attack on the Twin Towers. The term was used by news reporters in the immediate aftermath of the explosion and has stayed ever since. Ground Zero has come to symbolise the heart of the conflict between the west and Al Queda and its Islamist affiliates.  The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

From my recent post for the OUP Global Blog: Words are like clothes in that there are some that are only really suited to the young. Here are my top ten verbal equivalents of short skirts, low cut trousers and hoodies. These should be avoided by anyone over the age of… well, you decide. Can you guess the ten words? The full list  here : Urban Dictionary: 2011 Day-to-Day Calendar

Leading linguist Noam Chomsky poses one of the central question in this short video here . The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (Oxford Paperback Reference)

The word bailout has become closely associated with the idea of financial rescue -    to bail out the banks.  But it has many subtle usages - and two spellings! 1. The literal use of bail/bale is to abandon abruptly as in making an emergency exit from an aeroplane in a parachute.  2. The literal meaning of   to bail out  is to remove water from a leaky boat.  3. It is now more common to use bail   in a figurative/metaphorical sense: The minister has bailed on the government's housing policy ( announced his opposition) . The actor bailed on the script (stopped reading his lines with any show of conviction)  4. 'Bail out' is also used metaphorically but usually with a closer connection to the literal meaning: The pilot bailed out of his plane but not Bob has bailed out on us and gone home. 5. The noun is sometimes spelled as one word: bailout. 6. There is a dispute over the spelling of bail and bale - bail is probably used more frequently but both are allowed b

Because the OED tries to reflect the language as spoken and written. English is as Richard Lederer pointed out 'the most democratic language in history'.  To learn about the process by which words are selected see this interview with the OED editor. Oxford Dictionary of English Concise Oxford English Dictionary: 11th Edition Revised 2008 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: Sixth Edition

Child Language: Acquisition and Development

Mission creep is when an original plan or objective is progressively widened by events on the ground. Significantly the phrase has military origin Originating in Somalia in 1993, the modern term “mission creep” became part of official U.S. Army vocabulary a decade late r. Field Manual 3-07, Stability Operations and Support Operations (February 2003) acknowledges two types of mission creep. The first occurs when “the unit receives shifting guidance or a change in mission for which the unit is not properly configured or resourced.” Lewis and Clark  In other words you start with a limited objective but this expands to the point where it is no longer clear. This phrase has also been used to describe non-military matters - financial regulation, for example . The Dictionary of Military Terms

The King of the Dudes (1888) dude,  now perhaps most familiar as a slang term with a wide range of uses (including use as an all-purpose interjection for expressing approval:  "Dude!" ) Read more:   The use of 'dude' to describe a male person is becoming increasingly universal amongst young English speakers. Its origins are disputed but certainly date  back a little further than Dude, Where's my Car? (2000).  According to the American Heritage Dictionary: Originally it was applied to fancy-dressed city folk who went out west on vacation. In this usage it first appears in the 1870s.   Dude makes an appearance in and in Mark Twain's  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court  (1889) and  pops up in the letters of that unlikely hipster P.G Woodhouse  ('the only English characters the American public would read about were exaggerated dudes ' )   The word maintained its cult status, appearing in two classic rock songs  'All the

Texas Governor Rick Perry caused some controversy in recent Republican Presidential Debat by referring to the US social security system as a Ponzi scheme. Here's what he was alluding to: A Ponzi or pyramid scheme attracts investors by offering very high and consistent profits. In reality these 'profits' do not exist - early investors are paid with the money contributed by later ones. The original Charles Ponzi (1882 -1949) was not the first to run a pyramid scheme, but the collapse of his Boston-based financial fund in 1921 became an international scandal. All Ponzi schemes are eventually destroyed by the thing that sustains them: confidence. While the scheme is successful there does not appear to be a problem. The infamous Madoff fund prospered for decades until the financial crisis of 2008. It was when investors tried to withdraw their capital that the fraud was revealed. The use of the term Ponzi Scheme is no longer restricted to describing direct financial f

Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan (2007)puts forward the theory that the most important events are usually impossible to predict. The title refers to the fact that all swans were believed to be white - until a black one was discovered. This unpredictability is particularly important in relation to finance. A trader can calculate what he thinks is likely to happen in the market, taking into account known contingencies. What can't be predicted is what Donald Rumsfeld called - 'the unknown unknowns', There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on February 12, 2002 Taleb puts it like this The events that impact on our lives most are impossible to predict. After they occur we find rationalisations for them but we should accept