1、OfficialDictionaryofTheEnglishA Crunk Omnibus for Thrillionairesand Bampots for the Ecozoic AgeGrant BarrettUnofficialCopyright 2006 by Grant Barrett. All rights reserved.Manufactured in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the UnitedStates Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this p
2、ublication 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. 0-07-149163-5The material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this title: 0-07-145804-2.All trademarks are trademar
3、ks 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. Where such designations appear in this book, they h
4、ave beenprinted with initial caps. ABOUT THE AUTHORGrant 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 W possible. Grant is also co-host of the American language-related pub
5、lic 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 writte
6、n 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-monthl
7、y 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 th
8、e “Among the New Words“ column of the societys journal American Speech, is a member of the journals editorial review board, and helps organize the societys annual “word of the year“ vote. He is also a member of the Dictionary Society of North America and the Linguistic Society of America.ContentsAck
9、nowledgments ivIntroduction vAbout This Dictionary xiiChanging English xviiiDictionary 1Select Bibliography 407Full-Text Digital Resources 410For Further Information 411iiiAcknowledgmentsThanks to Erin McKean for her guidance, wisdom, and humor, andto Jonathan Lighter for demonstrating worthy models
10、 of both lex-icography and a lexicographer. 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 Bi
11、erma, 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 Saf
12、ire, Strawberry Saroyan, Jesse Sheidlower, Ava Swartz,Michael Volf, Steven I. Weiss, Douglas Wilson, David Wilton, BenZimmer, the online communities at L and WordOrigins.org, and everyone on ADS-L, the American Dialect Soci-ety e-mail list. You all make it easier.ivIntroductionThis book is the resul
13、t of hunting on the Internet for unrecordedwords. In these pages, youll find words youve never seen beforeeven though theyve been around for decades. Youll find old wordswith new definitions. Youll find foreign words tiptoeing into for-eign Englishes, sports jargon butting into politics, street slan
14、gbouncing 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 youll read is language that deserves a little moreattention.Although it may look like it at f
15、irst glance, not all of these wordsare new. 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 othe
16、r dictionaries. Two, they are interesting in and ofthemselves, either as cultural artifacts, for their history, or evenjust for the way they roll off the tongue.The Why of the Word HuntEarly in 1999 I began a Web blog called World New York. The websites primary focus was New York City and things of
17、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. In acasual fashion I also began recording interesting words as I cameacross them, presentin
18、g 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 m
19、ore to bedone than I had the time for because there were many lexical itemsthat seemed to be uncollected by anyoneat least, they didntappear in any of the dozens of dictionaries I owned.vSo in June 2004 I turned my blog into a dictionary-orientedweb site, which I named Double-Tongued Word Wrester (d
20、ouble-tongued.org). 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 docum
21、ent the undocumented and theunderdocumented.The 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
22、, and how they are used.Defining TermsThroughout this book, I use lexical item to 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). Ill also use the term reader. In le
23、xicogra-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 catchword.How the Corporations Do ItMost modern dictionar
24、y 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 ev
25、eryyear. 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 substantialeditors at Merriam-Webster have m
26、ore 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 connotat
27、ion thatmight not be immediately clear.Once its time to edit a particular part of a dictionary, the cita-tion slips (or database records) are gathered. If there are, for exam-ple, a dozen slips for crunk, then a draft entry can immediately bewritten. New research is then done to further substantiate
28、 the wordor to trace its origins. Words for which there is only a single cita-tion slip get a more thorough investigation. Readers are sent to lookat specific books, or to peruse the works of specific authors, or tomake inquiries into journals on specific subjects, all in the hope ofproving that a s
29、ingle citation represents a valid, recordable lexicalitem that deserves an entry in a dictionary.In the past twenty or so years, this work of substantiating termshas grown easier. First with the appearance of digital databases suchas Lexis Nexis, Dialog, and Westlaw, and now with the addition ofothe
30、rs such as Proquest Historical Newspapers (and ProquestsAmerican Periodical Series), NewspaperA, Dow JonesFactiva, Googles twenty-five-year archive of Usenet posts, the twoMaking of America databases at the University of Michigan andCornell University, and many others. Its easy to spend a few min-ut
31、es searching for a lexical item to find out if it has been used, bywhom, and what the user intended it to mean. Particularly for recentlexical items, etymological work has never been easier.Individuals unaffiliated with dictionary publishers, like a num-ber of pro-am volunteers associated with the A
32、merican Dialect Soci-ety, do this sort of history-hunting purely for the thrill of the huntand can, in a matter of minutes, destroy longstanding theories onword origins, develop new possible etymologies, expand the under-standing of new meanings for old words, and antedate lexical itemsby days or de
33、cades. As new databases come online and as thousandsof new digitized pages are added to the existing databases, there isalways new digital digging to be done. A much-anticipated news-paper digitization effort was announced by the National Endow-ment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress in
34、2004. Itwill preserve millions of periodical pages from 1836 to 1923 insearchable online archives.But this sort of research only revolutionizes the second primarytask of dictionary-making, the substantiationthe proving, vetting,Introductionviiand testingof found words. The first task, identifying pr
35、eviouslyunrecorded lexical items, is still relatively complex.Besides reading programs like the OEDs, dictionary publishersand third-party consortiums now develop corpora made up of hun-dreds of millions of words pulled from books, periodicals, con-versation and media transcripts, and elsewhere. Spe
36、cialized toolsanalyze them, looking for unique, new, or unusual patterns, asso-ciations, or usages. This brute force method, while effective, is alsotime-consuming, costly, and labor-intensive. It also requires spe-cialized technical knowledge in a field where time, money, andmanpower are often in s
37、hort supply. Certainly this method, like areading program, is probably inappropriate for a small dictionary-making operation, and definitely out of reach for a simple web sitecreated for the joy of revealing interesting language.What can a small operationor a solitary lexicographer orword freakdo to
38、 participate in the hunt? As it turns out, quite alot.Wayne Glowka, with the help of others, is the latest neologianto collect new words for the “Among the New Words” column inthe professional journal American Speech, a column that has beenpublished for more than fifty years. William Safire, with th
39、e helpof a series of able assistants and his readers, has been discussing newand novel language in a syndicated weekly column for more thantwenty years, on top of writing political commentary and books(including at least one political thriller). He is probably the most-recognized writer on language
40、in the United States. David Barnhart(of the famous Barnhart dictionary-making family) has been a partof publishing the quarterly Barnhart Dictionary Companion since1982, in which he brings his word finds to the attention of sub-scribers. Paul McFedriess Word Spy (), Evan MorrissWord Detective (word-
41、), and Michael QuinionsWorld Wide Words (worldwidewords.org) are three web sites thatexploit their creators penchants for constantly monitoring languagechange; all three solo word hunters have also turned out books.Given those models of mostly solitary word-hunting, its clearthat keeping an eye on t
42、he malleability of English discourse doesntrequire large budgets or manpower.IntroductionviiiTracking and Capturing the Wild JournalistOne of the characteristics shared by the best word hunters, bothprofessional and amateur, is erudition. That is, they tend to be well-educated (even if that educatio
43、n is autodidactic), literate, and, there-fore, thoroughly at home with the printed word.In looking through the citations I had casually gathered formy old Web blog, I noticed a curious pattern: writers are predictable.Journaliststhe source of most of my interesting wordshave atendency to flag words
44、that are new to their vocabulary with suchphrases as “known in military parlance as” or “referred to as” or “asthey 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 newwords to anyone who care
45、s to pay attention. Theyre like acciden-tal participants in a worldwide dictionary reading program, creat-ing texts right and left that they sprinkle with found words fromtheir daily interviews, research, and conversations. Therefore, whenthey introduce a new word with a phrase like “called in copsp
46、eak,”it behooves the word-hunter to pay attention.Thus, with the aforementioned digital databases (and manyothers) its easy to search for these collocationsthat is, to lookfor the juxtaposition of the identifying phrases such as “called bymany” or “referred to as”and then read nearby text to see if
47、thereis a word worth turning into a citation slipnot all that far off fromthe searching I did when looking for newsworthy bits about NewYork City for the old Web log.Reading all these news stories is still time-consuming, but thereare still other shortcuts. In order to speed the word-hunting, ser-vi
48、ces such as Google News permit collocation searches to be auto-mated. As of this writing Google News indexes more than 4,500English-language periodicals and news-oriented web sites that pub-lish on the World Wide Web. At no cost to the user, it permits thecreation of automated alerts that conduct se
49、arches in real time andthen delivers the results via an e-mail alert when theres a match.It turned out to be just the ticket for finding interesting newlexical items for the Double-Tongued Word Wrester web site. Cur-rently, with more than 800 collocations being searched, hundredsIntroductionixof e-mail messages arrive in my inbox daily, each of them containingat least one potentially citable lexical item. Google News also per-mits searches in foreign languages, so unique phrases in French,Eng
