As editor Jeffrey Sherwood explains, the OED once ran ads in newspapers that asked readers, when they came across an unusual word, to write it down and send it in. It’s not the first time they’ve turned to crowdsourcing. This is part of the reason that the OED, which has long positioned itself as the definitive record of the English language, launched their “youth slang appeal.” Submitting words isn’t a guarantee they’ll end up in the dictionary but it does mean the editors will consider researching them, defining them and adding them to the ranks. Meanwhile, meanings shift, new words get coined and old words get reinvented in ways that are designed to be confusing (for adults in general, as well as other outsiders and meddling authority figures). “Slang is notoriously difficult to track historically,” explains linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer, “because slang is very often the kind of language that resists standard treatment.” Slang often gets spoken before it gets written down, much less published and added to archives that professionals scour. So has slang’s primary purpose: to playfully disguise true meaning in a way that determines who is in the know and who is out.Īnd yet discovering the true path and meaning of slang is challenging work, for lone scholars like Green but even for experts who have institutional backing coming out their ears. After all, while the words may change, the thematic areas (sex, drugs, crime, insults, etc.) have remained unwavering for half a millennium. “What slang really does is show us at our most human,” says Green, who is also known as “Mister Slang.” It is the linguistic equivalent of our “unfettered Freudian id,” proof of how deeply we desire social affirmation, how subversive we can be and, in some ways, how unchanging humans are. Why? Because slang captures elements of humanity that are not recorded elsewhere. The Oxford English Dictionary recently launched a public appeal asking individuals to submit “unique words and expressions” that the kids are using. And Green is not the only one devoting a substantial intellect to establishing how long English speakers have been “gurking blurters” and the like.
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