more short takes

[Ben Zimmer]

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 3:17 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>
> 3) "Facepalm"--with or without a hyphen--has become a common chat and
> email refrain, both in noun and verb form. Now it's well beyond that
> kind of media.
>
> http://goo.gl/WjZtG
> > In Alabama and Mississippi, Romney claimed no historic connection like
> > he did with Michigan, New Hampshire or Wisconsin, but local
> > Republicans did a face-palm when he tried to court voters with a newly
> > Southern persona.
>
> New Media dictionaries have it--Wiktionary, UD and Wikipedia--and it's
> covered by WordSpy and Wordnik. Traditional dictionaries do not. The
> original use is "*facepalm*"--although in some email clients the
> asterisks mark "bold", in chat this traditionally identifies an "action"
> rather than something that is spoken.

Please check out the Winter 2011 issue of _American Speech_ for the
latest installment of "Among the New Words," which covers neologisms
related to Internet memes, including _facepalm_, _headdesk_,
_banhammer_, _rickroll_, and many others:

http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/content/86/4/454.full.pdf+html

We've got _facepalm_ going all the way back to 1996.

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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