The title of this post is how slang was described by Ambrose Bierce. The great thing about blogging, and wanting to provide links, is that you learn interesting things - like Bierce is from Meigs County, Ohio. I will need to look into him further.
The point of this post though, was to follow up on a drunken promise to discuss the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang in greater detail.
The dictionary only has two volumes available. Volume 1 is A to G and it weighs 6 lbs. That means it includes bookoodles of words, beginning with A-G. The first entry is "A", as a Noun, partial euphemism for "ass". Each entry includes several documented uses of the word. (I think Lighter required a certain number before a word could be included in the book.) An example in this entry is "1991 G. Trudeau Doonesbury (synd. cartoon strip) (Apr. 29): Ray! Time to haul A, man! We're moving out in ten minutes!" Six pages are dedicated to the word, "fuck".
Volume 2 is H to O. As I pointed out in a previous post, that spells Ho, which is slang for whore. HO only weighs 4 lbs. My copy is signed "To Mavis and DMC - Best Wishes, J. E. Lighter". Aj very good friend got it for me as a gift. This one starts with "H" for Hell. (Didn't see that coming, did you?) The Project Editor on this edition, Jesse Sheidlower, is also the editor of a dictionary called "The F Word" which was a best seller. Sheidlower is now the Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Lighter refused to finish the dictionaries because he supposedly felt his work was being taken too lightly. He didn't want his work to be trivialized and reduced to just lists of dirty words for shits and giggles. I don't blame him a bit.
I was devastated when I found out Lighter had no intention of completing the dictionary for Random House. However, while researching this post I discovered that Lighter's Oxford Historical Dictionary of American Slang, which will be the next volume in this set, was due out late 2006. So, if this is true, I will be a very happy woman.
You can read a really good interview with J. E. Lighter here. The man is a genius. PWTS will need to decide whether or not he wants to reveal any details of what it was like to actually work with Lighter on one of these dictionaries. I can only say that his dictionaries truly are the best of any I've seen.
"A truly unexpurgated collection of slang reminds us that the world of discourse, like the world of sense, is savage as well as sublime." —J. E. Lighter, American lexicographer and slanguist, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, 1994
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3 comments:
More on Lighter and the dictionary later, but Mavis hasn't revealed that she will be in the third volume, under the entry for "tweak" (v., to copulate).
Generally, Lighter requires at least two different citations to make sure that the word/term/phrase isn't "nonce" (that is, created on the spot for a particular situation) and exists outside too narrow of a community (such as a family or a small group of friends).
The other citation (provided Lighter hasn't collected more since I worked with him) for "tweak" comes from a Beastie Boys' track ("Get It Together").
Perhaps in a revised edition of A-G we'll see:
BRICK n. Bottle of Mogen David 20/20 (aka "Mad Dog"). So called because of it's brick-like shape. Used extensively in Bowling Green Ohio, 1989-1991. Part of "Bricks and Sticks", a game involving drinking copious amounts of Mad Dog and then hitting things with sticks, or making freshman climb into dumpsters."
I was probably drinking a few bricks when I said I hadn't been tweaked in weeks.
Have you checked to see if Mad Dog is in the H-O volume? The first time I met Lighter he came to a class and asked for examples of slang, then returned with analyses of our examples. "Brick" was new to him, but I think "Mad Dog" might have been, too.
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