Official Dictionary Unofficial English - A Way with Words

1 OfficialDictionaryofTheEnglishA Crunk Omnibus for Thrillionairesand Bampots for the Ecozoic AgeGrant BarrettUnofficialCopyright 2006 by Grant Barrett. All rights in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the UnitedStates Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced orditributed 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: trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners. Rather than put a trademarksymbol after every occurrence of a trademarked name, we use names in an editorialfashion only, and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringe-ment of the trademark.

2 Where such designations appear in this book, they have beenprinted with initial caps. ABOUT THE AUTHORG rant 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 possible. Grant is also co-host of the american language-related public radio show "A Way With Words " 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.

3 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 This DictionaryxiiChanging EnglishxviiiDictionary1 Select Bibliography407 Full-Text Digital Resources410 For Further Information411iiiAcknowledgmentsThanks to Erin McKean for her guidance, wisdom, and humor, andto Jonathan Lighter for demonstrating worthy models of both lex-icography and a lexicographer.

4 Special thanks to Laurence Urdangand 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, SteveDodson, Connie Eble, Cathy Giffi, Yesenia Gutierrez, SonyaKolowrat, Margaret Marks, Yisrael Medad, Bill Mullins, JohnnyNorth, Mark Peters, Barry Popik, James Proctor, Michael Quinion,William Safire, Strawberry Saroyan, Jesse Sheidlower, Ava Swartz,Michael Volf, Steven I.

5 Weiss, Douglas Wilson, David Wilton, BenZimmer, the online communities at and , and everyone on ADS-L, the american Dialect Soci-ety e-mail list. You all make it book is the result of hunting on the Internet for unrecordedwords. In these pages, you ll find Words you ve never seen before even though they ve been around for decades. You ll find old wordswith new definitions. You ll find foreign Words tiptoeing into for-eign Englishes, sports jargon butting into politics, street slangbouncing out of California, and Spanish moving comfortably intomainstream american English . From dozens of countries, from pol-itics and sports, slang and jargon, humdrum to extraordinary, newand old, what you ll read is language that deserves a little it may look like it at first glance, not all of these wordsare new.

6 Many are, but more than a few have histories spanningdecades or even a century. They all share, however, two character-istics. One, they are undocumented or underdocumented. Thismeans that there is more to be said about them than has so farappeared in other dictionaries. Two, they are interesting in and ofthemselves, either as cultural artifacts, for their history, or evenjust for the way they roll off the Why of the Word HuntEarly in 1999 I began a Web blog called World New York. The website s primary focus was New York City and things of interest to itsinhabitants. I developed a series of complex Web searches that dugdeep into the Internet and pulled out the new, the unusual, the pithy,and the funny and then posted them as extracts and links.

7 In acasual fashion I also began recording interesting Words as I cameacross them, presenting them mostly as curiosities. Because myreaders sent messages saying they liked the interesting Words , I spentextra time hunting them down. I soon realized that there were manyzillions of useful and interesting Words to be found if I looked hardenough and in the right way. But I also saw there was more to bedone than I had the time for because there were many lexical itemsthat seemed to be uncollected by anyone at least, they didn tappear in any of the dozens of dictionaries I in June 2004 I turned my blog into a Dictionary -orientedweb site, which I named Double-Tongued Word Wrester ( ).

8 It is what I call a growing Dictionary of old and newwords from the fringes of English . With the goal of reaching intothose uncharted waters and hooking the so-far uncaptured Words ,I began to think about the best way to collect the uncollected, torecord the unrecorded, to document the undocumented and How of the Word HuntWhen compiling dictionaries, there are two primary tasks. The firstis identifying lexical items, be they new Words or new meaningsfor old Words . The second is substantiating lexical items: provingwhere they come from, what they mean, and how they are TermsThroughout this book, I use lexical itemto mean anything that isto be defined, be it a single word, phrase, term, or affix, includingprefixes, suffixes, and infixes (syllables that are inserted into themiddle of other Words ).

9 I ll also use the term reader. In lexicogra-phy, a reader is someone who reads in an organized, consistent fash-ion with the intent of discovering new lexical items that warrantrecording. When a lexical item is first found but not yet substanti-ated as a definable term, it is a the Corporations Do ItMost modern Dictionary publishers of any size have archives, bothpaper and digital, of citations that have been collected by readerson the prowl for new language. Large Dictionary operations, likethat of the oxford English Dictionary (OED), have many paid andvolunteer readers who can return thousands of new citations everyyear.

10 Readers are usually assigned specific publications (includingruns of periodicals) to read their way through. Each time they findsomething that strikes them as new, noteworthy, or worth investi-gation, they cite it. The results of this work can be substantial editors at Merriam-Webster have more than sixteen million cita-tions on paper. These citations include the catchword, the source(book, newspaper, transcript, etc.), the date, the author, who saidIntroductionvior wrote it, and an exact quote of the Words used. A few notes mightbe added to a citation to indicate a context or connotation thatmight not be immediately it s time to edit a particular part of a Dictionary , the cita-tion slips (or database records) are gathered.