by NelsonMinar
0 subcomment
- Economist had a good article recently about how this came to be 15 years ago: https://www.economist.com/interactive/christmas-specials/202...
Long story short he got lucky in the 90s with an inheritance and a publisher and can now devote his life to researching and publishing English slang. It's also interesting to me because it's a project that started as a book but has now migrated successfully to the Internet, both for publishing the dictionary and for doing research for updates to the dictionary.
- Tough guys with Mullets that blasted Metallica said "Mint" (term of approval) every sentence back in 1980's Long Island. I just learned it also meant "a trace of homosexual tendencies" a few decades prior.
- I did a lot of text cleaning a while ago and we tried to normalize curse word spelling as part of that. That was, by far, the most interesting text cleaning I have ever done. It is really clear how much innovation in the English language is happening there.
- I can also recommend Roger's Profanisaurus for a British view of swearwords and vulgar euphemisms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger%27s_Profanisaurus
- Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London documented some of the swear words of his time [0].
It's interesting reading them as a native speaker, as there's so few that I could even begin to guess what they mean.
[0]: https://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/prose/Downand...
- Nice! Brings back memories how we made a list of expressions for "fucking" in Czech. Got to 344 before moving on. It's still online even!
https://www.pismak.cz/dilo/41683/
- I have a copy of Greens printed in the 1990s. It's very extensive and frankly seems like a hopeless exercise to gather them considering how fast language evolves, as well as hyperlocal terms.
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