Official Dictionary of Unofficial English-Grant-Barrett-0071458042

The Official

Dictionary

Unofficial

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.

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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 languagerelated 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 lexicography and a lexicographer. Special thanks to Laurence Urdang and the Dictionary Society of North America for their grant in support of my web site. For their suggestions, corrections, additions, notes, comments, and other help, thanks also are deserved by Gustavo Arellano, Nathan Bierma, Bill Brogdon, David Barnhart, Carlos 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 Society 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 characteristics. 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 (doubletongued.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 lexicography, 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 substantiated 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 example, 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 number of pro-am volunteers associated with the American Dialect Society, 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 understanding of new meanings for old words, and antedate lexical items by days or decades. As new databases come online and as thousands of new digitized pages are added to the existing databases, there is always new digital digging to be done. A much-anticipated newspaper digitization effort was announced by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress in 2004. It will preserve millions of periodical pages from 1836 to 1923 in searchable online archives.

But this sort of research only revolutionizes the second primary task of dictionary-making, the substantiation—the proving, vetting,

vii

Introduction

and testing—of found words. The first task, identifying previously unrecorded lexical items, is still relatively complex.

Besides reading programs like the OED’s, dictionary publishers and third-party consortiums now develop corpora made up of hundreds of millions of words pulled from books, periodicals, conversation and media transcripts, and elsewhere. Specialized tools analyze them, looking for unique, new, or unusual patterns, associations, or usages. This brute force method, while effective, is also time-consuming, costly, and labor-intensive. It also requires specialized technical knowledge in a field where time, money, and manpower are often in short supply. Certainly this method, like a reading program, is probably inappropriate for a small dictionarymaking operation, and definitely out of reach for a simple web site created for the joy of revealing interesting language.

What can a small operation—or a solitary lexicographer or word freak—do to participate in the hunt? As it turns out, quite a lot.

Wayne Glowka, with the help of others, is the latest neologian to collect new words for the “Among the New Words” column in the professional journal American Speech, a column that has been published for more than fifty years. William Safire, with the help of a series of able assistants and his readers, has been discussing new and novel language in a syndicated weekly column for more than twenty years, on top of writing political commentary and books (including at least one political thriller). He is probably the mostrecognized writer on language in the United States. David Barnhart (of the famous Barnhart dictionary-making family) has been a part of publishing the quarterly Barnhart Dictionary Companion since 1982, in which he brings his word finds to the attention of subscribers. Paul McFedries’s Word Spy (wordspy.com), Evan Morris’s Word Detective (word-detective.com), and Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words (worldwidewords.org) are three web sites that exploit their creators’ penchants for constantly monitoring language change; all three solo word hunters have also turned out books.

Given those models of mostly solitary word-hunting, it’s clear that keeping an eye on the malleability of English discourse doesn’t require large budgets or manpower.

viii

Introduction

Tracking and Capturing the Wild Journalist

One of the characteristics shared by the best word hunters, both professional and amateur, is erudition. That is, they tend to be welleducated (even if that education is autodidactic), literate, and, therefore, thoroughly at home with the printed word.

In looking through the citations I had casually gathered for my old Web blog, I noticed a curious pattern: writers are predictable. Journalists—the source of most of my interesting words—have a tendency to flag words that are new to their vocabulary with such phrases as “known in military parlance as” or “referred to as” or “as they call it” or “known to fans as” or even the straightforward “coined the word” or even just “new word.”

This means that journalists as a body are giving tips on new words to anyone who cares to pay attention. They’re like accidental participants in a worldwide dictionary reading program, creating texts right and left that they sprinkle with found words from their daily interviews, research, and conversations. Therefore, when they introduce a new word with a phrase like “called in copspeak,” it behooves the word-hunter to pay attention.

Thus, with the aforementioned digital databases (and many others) it’s easy to search for these collocations—that is, to look for the juxtaposition of the identifying phrases such as “called by many” or “referred to as”—and then read nearby text to see if there is a word worth turning into a citation slip—not all that far off from the searching I did when looking for newsworthy bits about New York City for the old Web log.

Reading all these news stories is still time-consuming, but there are still other shortcuts. In order to speed the word-hunting, services such as Google News permit collocation searches to be automated. As of this writing Google News indexes more than 4,500 English-language periodicals and news-oriented web sites that publish on the World Wide Web. At no cost to the user, it permits the creation of automated alerts that conduct searches in real time and then delivers the results via an e-mail alert when there’s a match.

It turned out to be just the ticket for finding interesting new lexical items for the Double-Tongued Word Wrester web site. Currently, with more than 800 collocations being searched, hundreds

ix