Talking with Ben Zimmer and other crossword mavens this year

inspired me to start making the mini crosswords that supporters at Patreon are getting now.

So during our current season break, I thought you'd enjoy hearing this episode.

That was also a bonus for supporters back in

October.

Greetings, Grammar Pellusians. I am here again with Ben Zimmer, linguist, lexicographer,

crossword puzzle writer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and more. And we're talking about

antedating, finding older examples of words than are in the dictionary. And Ben has some

amazing stories for us. Ben, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Hello, glad to extend the

conversation. Yeah, it's so much fun. So, you know, I'm a West Coast girl and I am familiar

with the bitchen wicked dichotomy between the East Coast and West Coast, but you have found out

interesting things about the word Hela, which, you know, to me is a word from the 90s, but it

goes back much, much farther than that. And so, like,

tell us the story of Hela. Yeah, this is one of those words I've been kind of on the trail for

quite a while. And it's the type of thing that people will say, yeah, Hela, like you're Hela excited

to mean very, or it can also mean many or much, depending on the context. It's this thing

that developed, you know, in the Bay Area and the San Francisco Bay Area and then spread from there.

And that's all true. But then for a long time, it was, you know, the earliest examples that

were found weren't even from the Bay Area. You know, the OED for a while had as their earliest citation, something from the Toronto

star, I think, you know, Toronto newspaper.

It's like, you know, can we get back to the source a little better?

And so I kept looking and finding new places to look for sources to sort of trace it back because I think it was, you know, 1987 is what the OED had.

...