Thursday, February 11, 2010
A Brief History of 'Snowmageddon'
Following a lead from a Facebook response I saw on a friend's comment, I thought I had discovered the origin of the term Snowmageddon from a 1998 2008 storm in Minnesota HERE. However, being a linguist, I decided to follow-up a bit. Of course, I started with Mark Davies' BYU Corpora, but had no luck discovering the term. Then I did some Googling/Binging. In fact, the earliest instance of the term I could find comes from that distant year 2007 HERE. 2008 seems to have been a banner year for the term across the whole country. Numerous examples follow:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-
The commenters over at Liberman's post Apico-labials in English all clearly prefer the spelling syncing , but I find it just weird look... -
Matt Damon's latest hit movie Elysium has a few linguistic oddities worth pointing out. The film takes place in a dystopian future set i...
-
(image from Slate.com ) I tend to avoid Slate.com these days because, frankly, I typically find myself scoffing at some idiot article they...
3 comments:
One reason 2008 was such a big year for Snowmageddon was that the word was used in a severe-weather warning (later pulled) from Environment Canada that was widely broadcast. "Could this be snowmageddon?" it asked?
Interesting. I also noticed that Seattle figured prominently in the 2008 instances.
Your 2007 "Snowmageddon" origins link is not working. Have a better link? Thanks!
Post a Comment