I have just uploaded the fruits of my latest researches (I say ‘my’ but as ever I must offer great thanks to all those who have sent me material, especially to the remarkable Jim Gibbons and to Dr Helen Wickstead). These cover the last 90 days of truffling whatever sources have come into recent focus.
I offer two downloadable Excel files (see below: click on the far right ‘hamburger’ icon and then on ‘download’ to obtain each file). These cover the two objects of research. The first lists those terms and/or senses for which I have been able to find a predate. For instance
Column one shows an existing headword as found in the dictionary (bracketed numbers show the sense in question). Column 2 is the new ‘first recorded use’, column 3 the previous date as recorded, and column 4 the differential between ‘before’ and ‘after’. These examples (all in all I have found 118 predates) are, by slang standards, reasonably impressive revisions of the available dating; but a check on the rest of the file will show a good deal more terms for which the predates are far more modest, down to a single year. Talk shit v. (5), to speak in slang, may claim but a twelve-month improvement, but it is there and the researcher is grateful. So too, I hope, the dictionary’s user. The facts, as Sgt Joe Friday intoned in TV’s Dragnet, just the facts (even if in truth he never actually did; which sounds like a claimed ‘first use’ to me - hope over experience).
No matter: the aim of 'lexicography on historical principles’ is to find that moment when a term or sense first arrives on stage. The challenge is the absence in the majority of cases of a full script. Mouldering pages are disinterred from battered box or auctioned library, or more usually, the big online scanners offer a new tranche of vintage material. Research never ends. It is braver dictionary-maker than am I who states ‘first use’ without the modifying and face-saving ‘recorded’ within .
Thus heat n. (1b) ‘sexual excitement’, had puttered along happily as a discovery of 1963 and was cited from a pimp’s memoir published that year. But as I regularly remind myself and others, ‘it’s always older than you think’, and in this case ‘older’ means nearly four centuries. For nest n.4 ‘a criminal hang-out’, the standing date was 1903. Thanks again to Addington’s translation of Apuleius’ Golden Ass, we can push it back 337 years. Addington also offers an attributive use of hangman, meaning rascally (a stereotype that might be questioned these relativist days), that pushes our knowledge back some 268 years. And so it goes.
The predate is satisfying, beyond all else if I am honest (a niche game if ever such existed, but what greater joy than tapping respectfully on the OED’s redoubtable door and then whispering to some answering savant, ‘Gotcha!’). But it is generally played by initiates and we are very few in number and those who hunt down slang are fewer yet. Nor, especially in slang world, does Joe Punter admire the quality of chronology beyond the novelty of the vocabulary’s ever-expanding width. They, and to an extent I, want the hot new poop.
Thus the second file:
which offers some 161 terms that have either never been recorded in GDoS, whether as a full-on headword, or as a sub-sense of one of these top-level items. For instance:
As the dates make clear, we are not invariably looking at hot-off-the-trend-setting-young-people material. In GDoS terms new means new to the dictionary. There are various reasons, human error doubtless topping all else, but the failure of a book or similar text (dead tree or digital) to have been read (oversight or lack of accessibility) will outweigh the arrival of this year’s hot new coinages. None of which will please marketing departments, who demand the latest lingo (even if it turns out to be no more than yet another variation on a theme - for instance man ‘hits woman’ as the founding and enduring image of fucking - that has remained unchanged for centuries. As one who lacks support - academic, institutional, commercial - I lack marketing too, so I can only offer my narcissistic version of ‘new’.
What has been consulted in a given update period obviously determines what follows. I have, for instance, been eviscerating the fine works of Richard Milward (I have mentioned his Man-eating Typewriter elsewhere.) These have provided a good proportion of what has been added of late: 661 citations in all (including 148 ‘first recorded uses’, whether new terms or predates; and I still have two-thirds of one book to investigate). He offers 96 new terms, a good proportion of which are of Polari, the slang of an earlier gay community.
At the distant end of the chronology, one finds Addington again, with a plural use of member (1566) usually the penis, to mean the testicles. En route to modernity one meets the roomy dodge (1848) sitting with limbs akimbo, thus the Victorian equivalent of ‘manspreading’, brown off (1915) to lose enthusiasm and commitment, a yellow pumpkin (1941) a mixed-race individual, bushwhacker (1964) usually the penis but here a cunnilinctor, bung 1982) otherwise the anus (or a publican) but here anal intercourse and do the squelch, (2007) to have sex, presumably hat-tipping to Johnny Rotten’s definition of love as ‘2 minutes and 52 seconds of squelching noises.’
