Official Dictionary of Unofficial English

The Official Dictionary Unofficialof English A Crunk Omnibus for Thrillionaires and Bampots for the Ecozoic Age Grant Barrett Copyright © 2006 by Grant Barrett. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or ditributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. 0-07-149163-5 The material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this title: 0-07-145804-2. All trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners. Rather than put a trademark symbol after every occurrence of a trademarked name, we use names in an editorial fashion only, and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringe- ment of the trademark. Where such designations appear in this book, they have been printed with initial caps. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Grant Barrett is an American lexicographer and dictionary editor specializing in slang and new words. He is part of the team of lexicographers that make the new online dictionary Wordnik.com possible. Grant is also co-host of the American language- related public radio show "A Way With Words" http://www.waywordradio.org and editor of the "Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang" (2004, Oxford University Press), and is well-known for his prize-winning online Double-Tongued Dictionary. Besides being a widely quoted language authority, Grant has written on language for such newspapers as the Washington Post and the New York Times, has contributed to the British book series "The Language Report," and is a public speaker about dictionaries and slang. He also writes a fortnightly column about English-language slang for the Malaysia Star, a bi-monthly dictionary update for the journal Copyediting, and has worked as a business and music journalist. He serves as vice president of the American Dialect Society, an academic organization devoted since 1889 to the study of English in North America. He also is chair of its New Words Committee, edits the "Among the New Words" column of the society's journal American Speech, is a member of the journal's editorial review board, and helps organize the society's annual "word of the year" vote. He is also a member of the Dictionary Society of North America and the Linguistic Society of America. Contents Acknowledgments iv Introduction v About This Dictionary xii Changing English xviii Dictionary 1 Select Bibliography 407 Full-Text Digital Resources 410 For Further Information 411 iii Acknowledgments Thanks to Erin McKean for her guidance, wisdom, and humor, and to Jonathan Lighter for demonstrating worthy models of both lex- icography and a lexicographer. Special thanks to Laurence Urdang and the Dictionary Society of North America for their grant in sup- port of my web site. For their suggestions, corrections, additions, notes, comments, and other help, thanks also are deserved by Gus- tavo Arellano, Nathan Bierma, Bill Brogdon, David Barnhart, Car- los Caga-anan II, Hunter Cutting, Jamie Davis, Paul Deppler, Steve Dodson, Connie Eble, Cathy Giffi, Yesenia Gutierrez, Sonya Kolowrat, Margaret Marks, Yisrael Medad, Bill Mullins, Johnny North, Mark Peters, Barry Popik, James Proctor, Michael Quinion, William Safire, Strawberry Saroyan, Jesse Sheidlower, Ava Swartz, Michael Volf, Steven I. Weiss, Douglas Wilson, David Wilton, Ben Zimmer, the online communities at Languagehat.com and Word Origins.org, and everyone on ADS-L, the American Dialect Soci- ety e-mail list. You all make it easier. iv Introduction This book is the result of hunting on the Internet for unrecorded words. In these pages, you’ll find words you’ve never seen before— even though they’ve been around for decades. You’ll find old words with new definitions. You’ll find foreign words tiptoeing into foreign Englishes, sports jargon butting into politics, street slang bouncing out of California, and Spanish moving comfortably into mainstream American English. From dozens of countries, from politics and sports, slang and jargon, humdrum to extraordinary, new and old, what you’ll read is language that deserves a little more attention. Although it may look like it at first glance, not all of these words are new. Many are, but more than a few have histories spanning decades or even a century. They all share, however, two character- istics. One, they are undocumented or underdocumented. This means that there is more to be said about them than has so far appeared in other dictionaries. Two, they are interesting in and of themselves, either as cultural artifacts, for their history, or even just for the way they roll off the tongue. The Why of the Word Hunt Early in 1999 I began a Web blog called World New York. The web site’s primary focus was New York City and things of interest to its inhabitants. I developed a series of complex Web searches that dug deep into the Internet and pulled out the new, the unusual, the pithy, and the funny and then posted them as extracts and links. In a casual fashion I also began recording interesting words as I came across them, presenting them mostly as curiosities. Because my readers sent messages saying they liked the interesting words, I spent extra time hunting them down. I soon realized that there were many zillions of useful and interesting words to be found if I looked hard enough and in the right way. But I also saw there was more to be done than I had the time for because there were many lexical items that seemed to be uncollected by anyone—at least, they didn’t appear in any of the dozens of dictionaries I owned. v Introduction So in June 2004 I turned my blog into a dictionary-oriented web site, which I named Double-Tongued Word Wrester (double- tongued.org). It is what I call “a growing dictionary of old and new words from the fringes of English.” With the goal of reaching into those uncharted waters and hooking the so-far uncaptured words, I began to think about the best way to collect the uncollected, to record the unrecorded, to document the undocumented and the underdocumented. The How of the Word Hunt When compiling dictionaries, there are two primary tasks. The first is identifying lexical items, be they new words or new meanings for old words. The second is substantiating lexical items: proving where they come from, what they mean, and how they are used. Defining Terms Throughout this book, I use lexical item to mean anything that is to be defined, be it a single word, phrase, term, or affix, including prefixes, suffixes, and infixes (syllables that are inserted into the middle of other words). I’ll also use the term reader. In lexicogra- phy, a reader is someone who reads in an organized, consistent fashion with the intent of discovering new lexical items that warrant recording. When a lexical item is first found but not yet substanti- ated as a definable term, it is a catchword. How the Corporations Do It Most modern dictionary publishers of any size have archives, both paper and digital, of citations that have been collected by readers on the prowl for new language. Large dictionary operations, like that of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), have many paid and volunteer readers who can return thousands of new citations every year. Readers are usually assigned specific publications (including runs of periodicals) to read their way through. Each time they find something that strikes them as new, noteworthy, or worth investigation, they cite it. The results of this work can be substantial— editors at Merriam-Webster have more than sixteen million citations on paper. These citations include the catchword, the source (book, newspaper, transcript, etc.), the date, the author, who said vi Introduction or wrote it, and an exact quote of the words used. A few notes might be added to a citation to indicate a context or connotation that might not be immediately clear. Once it’s time to edit a particular part of a dictionary, the citation slips (or database records) are gathered. If there are, for exam- ple, a dozen slips for crunk, then a draft entry can immediately be written. New research is then done to further substantiate the word or to trace its origins. Words for which there is only a single citation slip get a more thorough investigation. Readers are sent to look at specific books, or to peruse the works of specific authors, or to make inquiries into journals on specific subjects, all in the hope of proving that a single citation represents a valid, recordable lexical item that deserves an entry in a dictionary. In the past twenty or so years, this work of substantiating terms has grown easier. First with the appearance of digital databases such as Lexis Nexis, Dialog, and Westlaw, and now with the addition of others such as Proquest Historical Newspapers (and Proquest’s American Periodical Series), NewspaperArchive.com, Dow Jones Factiva, Google’s twenty-five-year archive of Usenet posts, the two Making of America databases at the University of Michigan and Cornell University, and many others. It’s easy to spend a few minutes searching for a lexical item to find out if it has been used, by whom, and what the user intended it to mean. Particularly for recent lexical items, etymological work has never been easier. Individuals unaffiliated with dictionary publishers, like a num- ber of pro-am volunteers associated with the American Dialect Soci- ety, do this sort of history-hunting purely for the thrill of the hunt and can, in a matter of minutes, destroy longstanding theories on word origins, develop new possible etymologies, expand the under- standing of new meanings for old words, and antedate lexical items by days or decades.

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