Peter Fisk has pointed out that Arnold Zwicky's recent essay on Robert Hartwell Fiske's reaction to trepidatious is "a fisking of a Fiske".
I can't believe I missed this accidental (?) pun myself. I nominated fisk for ADS 2003 Word of the Year, a suggestion that got no traction at all at the meeting. In the end, the palm went to metrosexual. (These two words are still reasonably competitive in cyberspace, with 121,000 web hits on Google for fisking, and 183,000 for metrosexual. My money is still on fisking in the long haul, but we'll see.)
Meanwhile, Helpful Google still asks
Did you mean: fishing
Posted by Mark Liberman at November 19, 2004 07:29 AM