For reasons I do not understand - surely they stem neither from slang’s nature, however problematic it may be for some, nor from my lexicographical incursions into social media which cannot merit the kind of hostility that in turn generates destructive hacking - Green’s Dictionary of Slang is currently telling me it won’t come out to play (or as the screen declares, there is ‘an application error’). This happened some time yesterday and has yet to right itself. I don’t know whether others have noticed - there are many more important matters for the world’s attention - and apologise most sincerely to those who have tried to check some entry out. All I can say is that it will be dealt with as soon as possible. Or so I hope.
It is especially irritating, Murphy’s Law and all that, that such a glitch should arise now, when I am readying the latest 90-day update to the database. Indeed, it is already late. My excuse is that during this latest quarter we have moved not merely apartments (leaving two in fact, in different countries) and replaced them with a third, but countries too. Now, to use an old story-telling formula I have always liked, we are to be found in this year of 20— in the city of M— .
This has not been conducive to research - library in boxes, broadband to be re-attached, attention to be paid, however reluctantly, to the world beyond slang - but slang does not sleep and nor can I. My usual thanks, as well, to everyone who has offered material. You are invaluable and I am very grateful.
As of now, the full dictionary offers 57,200 entries, which, since it is ‘nested’ (i.e. compounds, phrases, etc are usually found at a headword, typically the relevant noun, not independently), contain between them some 143,767 senses/definitions. The whole edifice is erected on the proof of 629,644 citations or usage examples.
However this update is, and I apologise, far slimmer than I should have preferred. All in all I have increased the database material by 1,327 citations within 1,015 headwords. It offers 121 new terms and 46 predates of terms that were already recorded. A file should be available here if you have Dropbox. It shows what has been achieved. Column A is the headword, columns B+C the new and previous ‘first use’ dates and column E the achieved length of pre-date. Column D (‘new’) is self-evident.
Of the predates, the champion of this revision is the word pickthank, a flatterer, a sycophant; a tale-bearer, a tell-tale. Hardly new, the current entry offers a first recorded use of 1508. Thanks to the posting on line of an extract from Chronicles of the Crusades by Richard of Devizes, where the term is listed among such unsavoury individuals as ‘Garamates, pickthanks, catamites, effeminate evildoers, lewd musical girls…’ we can revise that date to c.1204. A solid 304 years earlier. Less spectacular (in pre-date terms) is the pushing back of cap, to hit or punch in the face, from 1997 to 1895, 102 years. And for a final example, all-in, a brawl and currently dated 1986 and linked to Australia, is now also found in 1895 (‘the game of all-in’) and in the UK.
The date 1895 reflects my primary research source of the update, a late 19th century sporting magazine with the all-encompassing title of The Boxing World & Mirror of Life. The year, and it is not finished yet, has offered examples of 426 terms, 70 either new or pre-dates.
Finally a few novelties, mainly from the last two decades. There are various sources, the following come from Frank Bill’s Back to the Dirt (2023, the latest in his ‘Grit-lit’ novels based in the underworld and underclass of rural Indiana: blow the beets female-to-male fellatio, bump dicks, to enage in man-to-man macho display, you want some cheese with that whine? used in mockery of one who is considered to be self-pitying, cock book and titty calendar, a couple of self-explanatory forms of (soft) porn and Turkey, Wild Turkey Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey, a cousin of such pleasures as Jack (Daniels) and Jim (Beam).
Normal service, etc. It had better be.