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.

• sublinear

  today at 3:15 PM

  [flagged]

  • Loughla

    today at 3:26 PM

    With all due respect, genuinely, what are you talking about?

    I don't read any angst in that comment, just an interesting observation about local slang and the history of similar words.

    Also if you're not supposed to comment about culture or identity in a thread about slang, a very cultural and identity specific concept, what's the point of the article?

  • rc5150

    today at 4:04 PM

    Your comment reeks of elitism and condescension. If you're this upset over a public comment on a public forum, perhaps you should take your needless pedantry to a private forum where you can moderate out anyone with differing perspectives.

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/

• fanf2

  today at 2:48 PM

  There is an English dictionary of fuck called The F Word

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_F-Word_(book)

• blauditore

  today at 3:44 PM

  Translating this page to English is quite funny

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.