There's a fascinating crossword-related tidbit in @samrob12's @NYTimes obituary for Edward B. Johnson, the CIA officer involved in the "Argo" rescue mission that got US consular officials out of Iran in Jan. 1980. (1/8) nytimes.com/2024/09/11/us/… Johnson exfiltrated the consular officials by getting them on a plane out of Tehran, posing as a film crew scouting locations for the nonexistent sci-fi movie "Argo." (The Affleck movie "Argo" didn't depict Johnson since his identity was only recently revealed.) (2/8)

Today's the 120th anniversary of a key moment in the history of English honorifics. On Nov. 10, 1901, the Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican suggested that "a void in the English language" may be filled by "Ms." (pronounced "Mizz") as an alternative to "Miss" or "Mrs." 🧵 1/13 Word researchers often try to one-up each other via "antedating," i.e., finding progressively earlier examples of a particular lexical item. In my years of playing the antedating game, finding the first known proposal for the title "Ms." is perhaps my proudest achievement. 2/13

Some thoughts on Facebook's announcement that the company is hereby known as @Meta. As @pardesoteric wrote for @WIRED, the new name is meant to signal a future for Facebook that is "beyond social media, and beyond all the bad news." 🧵 1/9 wired.com/story/facebook… @Meta @pardesoteric @WIRED I gave some thought to the trend of "going meta"... back in 2012. At the time, @guyraz got in touch with me because he noticed the young staffers at @npratc were using "meta" all the time, as in "That's so meta." 2/9 npr.org/2012/05/05/152…

In this weekend's @WSJ Review section: "hella" is a slang intensifier with roots in the East Bay (especially Oakland) going back for decades. Thread to follow, with more research findings! 1/
bit.ly/hellabz The search for early examples of "hella" from the Bay Area is ongoing. The @OED's entry for "hella," published online in 2002, has as its earliest citation a 1987 example from Toronto (pretty far from the East Bay!). But we can do better. 2/

You may recall the news a few months ago that @MerriamWebster was revising its entry for "racism" after hearing from a young Black activist and recognizing the need for an update. That update is finally here, as I discuss in my latest for @TheAtlantic. 1/ theatlantic.com/culture/archiv… Thread! Let's start with the entry for "racism" as it looked before this week's update. This was, in fact, how @MerriamWebster had defined it for nearly 60 years, going back to the publication of the Third New International Unabridged back in 1961. 2/
web.archive.org/web/2020061009…

Just in time for the release of the Mueller report, my latest @WSJ column is on the shifting meaning of "redaction," from organizing text to editing to concealing sensitive information. bit.ly/redactbz Here's more detail (as requested by @joshtpm et al) about how "redaction" changed from mere editing to concealing sensitive info in a public document. A lot of the early "redaction" action was in the New York court system, as seen in appeals court opinions in the '50s and '60s.