Chambers Slang Dictionary by Jonathon Green is my usual first stop for slang queries and browsing, because it’s the biggest such book on my shelf – size matters in lexicography – and also the best. A quote on the spine says, “Dr. Johnson would have moaned with delight”, and while I could live without the thought of Samuel Johnson making pleasure-noises on my shelf, the sentiment holds.

2010 saw publication of the eponymous Green’s Dictionary of Slang, a three-volume behemoth based like the OED on historical principles, giving slang the deep scholarship it deserves – and more than it has ever received before. Green has since updated thousands of its entries in his database, but since GDoS might not see a revised print edition, I only hope it goes online one day. [Edit: it did, for subscribers.]

Green’s life and work are the twin topics of his new book Odd Job Man: Some Confessions of a Slang Lexicographer, kindly sent to me for review by Jonathan Cape in London. It aims “both to demystify ‘the dictionary’ and to give some glory to slang, one of language’s most disdained of subsets.” These modest aims it achieves, and then some: this is a belter of a book.*

“Mr Slang”, a nickname conferred by Martin Amis and since “paraded shamelessly in all publicity”, is apt. Green is besotted with slang and utterly at home in the odd job of slang lexicography; work and life are inextricably entangled. Early chapters of Odd Job Man are personal, later ones more focused on slang, but each bleeds into the other.

His life begins with drama and is not short of it thereafter:

you are born. Nobody asked me, as they say, but it happens. It is long and for your mother painful and you bear the scars. 1948: high forceps. Your father is informed: we can’t save them both. He begs to differ. Fortunately or otherwise he prevails. . . . Your mother, consciously or otherwise, does not forgive you. There will be no more children.

Green, though of mixed-European background, is uncertain of his ancestry: “I may know my signature, I have been putting it in my books for over fifty years, but I do not know my own name.” He has a way of delivering such details in prose that hums with meaning but never feels burdened by implication or invocation.

His account of growing up is impressionistic, sketching events and inferring patterns rather than attempting anything systematic. There is an early attraction to words: the best thing about visiting his relatives as a five-year-old is the word Shufflebotham’s inscribed across a terrace-end. And there are formative encounters with slang: Polari on the radio, Wodehouse and Sapper in the school library:

What my consumption of yesterday’s popular potboilers made clear, again subconsciously, was that if you wanted interesting language, you weren’t going to get it along the straight and narrow. The good stuff was off down the alleyways, along the waterfronts, in the back rooms of addresses whose frontage would in real life scare you far away.

Other influences are identified and explored: ’60s counterculture, Jewishness (“Perhaps to cherish a marginal language you must be yourself marginal”), and underground journalism – though Green acknowledges problems with both parts of that phrase. Though no hermit he usually opts for “voluntary solitude”, to which as an only child he is accustomed. It suits what becomes his life’s work (slash work’s life).

Slang is a slippery beast, “innately imprecise” and difficult to pin down or fence; existing definitions of it are more or less helpful but invariably deficient. The best solution may be to consider it from as many angles as possible, and Odd Job Man goes some way towards doing this, in consistently engaging fashion.

Green obsesses over slang, and his descriptions of it are fertile, provocative and complex: slang as the great doubter, the rebellious naysayer, vicious and amoral repository of outsider street lingo; slang as “linguistic patricide”, slaughtering its predecessors; slang less a linguistic phenomenon than a psychological one, “the linguistic id”:

Given its position on the margins one might see it as a means of self-affirmation: I denigrate/blaspheme/utter obscenities, therefore I am. Shouting dark words into the darkness of the world. Slang is aggressive, angry. It is frustrated by the way the world works, by the hypocrisy of the powerful. It is cynical but its cynicism is that of the failed romantic.

Like slang itself, the author (or his persona) is trenchant, subversive, and wryly self-conscious, an ideal host for the subject matter. Wordplay is deft and multipurpose: on the fallibility of slang lexicography he says his citations “should not be taken as gospel. Or rather, that’s exactly what they should be taken for: a concoction created to persuade.”

In many ways the internet has, for good or ill, democratised authority. Urban Dictionary is “relativism epitomised”, says Green, yet “awe is one thing, intellectual trust is quite another”. But while the net has made his task infinitely more daunting, it has also simplified it. Gone are the thousands of handwritten citations, replaced at a stroke by computer. In 1984 he threw them in a skip; “A passing tramp extracted one, read it and spat.”

Odd Job Man reveals the nuts and bolts of slang lexicography, reflecting on peers, publishing, plagiarism, and practicalities, the question of authority, the nature of definition, how the work differs from regular lexicography. He wades into its sometimes vexed etymologies, not least that of slang itself (“I sympathise with the need for popular etymology, but still despise it”), and the occasional frustration of indecipherable slang.

Offsetting these snags is the sheer fun of working in the milieu: the scholarly thrills and sordid spills; the joy of ordinary research, inasmuch as reading for slang can be considered ordinary. Such material proliferates: while it may be possible to read just about all the published slang from a period some centuries back, Green knows he cannot now keep up: “GDoS scratched the surface, now we are starting to burrow.” He says that like every lexicographer he is:

running a marathon that never ends. It was ever so: a dictionary is ‘finished’ only to accommodate the dictates of a publisher’s deadline and language merely laughs at the exhausted drudge and moves on.

A word of caution for sensitive readers. Strong language is used, and especially mentioned, throughout. This is to be expected given that Green has catalogued 5012 slang terms relating to crime, 4589 to drink, 3976 drugs, 1740 sex, 1351 penis, 1180 vagina, 831 death, 570 national/racial abuse, 540 excretion, etc.** Lest you suppose him inured to slang’s aggressive effect, certain terms do make him wince. Just two, mind.

Green’s memoir-of-sorts Odd Job Man is bracingly informative and compulsively readable, like a good slang dictionary, while presenting its critical, autobiographical and existential considerations in a bold and thoroughly quotable style: I recommend it highly to anyone interested in slang, dictionary-making, and non-standard language usage. You can order it from Random House UK / Australia, or Amazon.

*

* belter n. 3. [1950s+] something exceptional, exciting, amusing, etc. (Courtesy of Chambers Slang Dictionary.)

** I expect some of these figures have grown in the months since the book was written.

Just as culture has its counterculture, so language has its nonconformist, outsider self. Why it’s called slang is an enduring mystery to etymologists and lexicographers, but the elusiveness only adds to its intrigue.

Much of slang by its very nature goes unrecorded, or at least did so before the internet turned half the world into quasi-publishers. This makes tracking the history of slang a real challenge – how do you flesh out something that never had a proper skeleton to begin with?

Enter Jonathon Green, aka Mister Slang, whose new book Language! 500 Years of the Vulgar Tongue provides a sturdy history. (Its publisher, Atlantic Books, kindly sent me a copy for review.) Language! is a thoroughly engaging account of slang’s development from the early days of criminal cant to the broader current-day incarnations stemming from our cities’ subcultural and multicultural vernaculars.

Born in the street, it resists the niceties of the respectable. It is impertinent, mocking, unconvinced by rules, regulations and ideologies. It is a subset of language that since its earliest appearance has been linked to the lower depths, the criminal, the marginal, the unwanted or even persecuted members of society. It has been censored, ignored, shoved to one side and into the gutter from where it is widely believed to take its inspiration and in which it and its users have a home. It remains something apart, and for many that is where it should stay.

Slang has gradually gone partly mainstream – think of young people’s clippings (totes morto) and internet-driven fads (because memes) – but familiarity was once its enemy, and still can be. Thieves’ cant, ancestor of slang, was “a marginal language used by marginal people in a way that was consciously secretive”. Criminals relied on its obscurity, creating new terms to replace what was “smoked out”.

Pop culture has long allowed the public to experience transgressive language and behaviour from a safe distance. But by explaining cant in poems, ballads and pamphlets it compromised its purpose. Such artefacts had their ethical cake and ate it too, by exploiting the details of illicit activity while warning of the moral dangers. The particular appeal of this niche persisted,

whether in villainous ‘confessions’, gallows repentances, street-sold ballads or in today’s criminal memoirs.

Steadily pop culture began to adopt and disseminate more general slang, using it as it had used underworld cant: to lend authenticity and atmosphere. Though the civilian milieu “does not itself coin many slang words and phrases,” Green writes, “outside the oral use in which slang finds its sources it is perhaps the most efficient means of spreading them”. Early lexicographers duly took note, and gathered ever more of it.

There is also more of the devil in the details of slang than in conventional haunts. A little snakesman, we learn, is a small boy who is pushed through a small open window so he can open a door for thieves to enter without difficulty. A blue pigeon flyer steals the lead from roofs. The resurrection rig means body-snatching. A highwayman in Australia is a bushranger, and says “Bail up!” in place of “Stand and deliver!”

Slang, like all language, is embedded in culture, and a history of it must provide the social context of its use. Green does so with facility and enthusiasm, describing for instance not just the origins and development of cockney rhyming slang but the nature of ‘cockney’ itself – which apparently refers to someone born within the sound of the bells of the church of Saint Mary le Bow in London.

Green has written other social history books, so he is on comfortable ground here. He is at ease with data and puts his files to good use (“Slang, being a language of synonyms and themes, repeats itself. The penis has taken on 1,200 aliases in 500 years. . . . Slang’s vagina monologue is equally fecund”). Repetition can be weirdly wonderful, as in slang’s endless variations on the same few themes. Take this remarkable set of 17thC blasphemy-avoidance:

ads meant God’s and came in such compounds as adsblood! adsbleed! adsbud! Adsbudikins! adsheart! ad’s (heart’s) wounds! (also ad’s heartlikins! … heartliwounds! … waudds! … waunds! … wauntlikins!), adslife! (also adslidikins! ads my life, adsnigs! adso! (God’s oath!) and adsooks! adzooks! or ads wooks! Gad played a parallel role, giving gadsbobs! (also gadsbud!) gadsbodikins! (also gadsbudakins!) gadslid! gadsnigs! gadsnouns! (also gad-zoons! gadzounds!) gadso! gadsokers! (also gadsookers! gad-zookers!) gadsprecious! gadswogs! gadswoons! (also gad zoons!) and gadzooks! (also gadsooks! gadzookens! gadzookikins!). All these and many more invoked God’s blood, body, heart, wounds, nails and the synonymous ‘hooks’ and so on.

If you’re the sort of person who finds such lists fascinating, you’ll be in your element here. The book is peppered with colourful terminology and the equally colourful characters who coined, popularised, and collected it. Alongside forays into military slang, gay slang, sporting slang, and jive talk, there is astute analysis of particular authors’ and musicians’ use of it, and expert commentary throughout.

Language! is a richly entertaining and authoritative history of vulgar English, a defence and celebration of it, and a fitting complement to the author’s recent memoir-of-sorts Odd Job Man. Opened at random it offers rude rewards and rabbit-holes of alternative history. If that’s your poison, you can get Language! at your local bookshop or from the online store of your choice via Atlantic Books.

[archive of language book reviews]

I have two new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. The wacky world of ‘wack’ and ‘whack’ looks briefly at these similar (and sometimes overlapping) words with many meanings in informal usage:

Whack meaning ‘hit’, as a noun and verb, is centuries old but remains informal compared to such synonyms as strike, blow, and knock. It may be onomatopoeic in origin, which is why it’s used as a sound effect in comic books and the old Batman TV show. It also has the related meaning ‘kill’, for example in criminal slang.

Wack emerged more recently as a back-formation from wacky. Initially it was a noun used to refer to a crazy or eccentric person – He’s a real wack – with wacko and whacko emerging as slangy offshoots. This was followed by adjectival wack meaning bad, unfashionable, stupid or of low quality, as in the anti-drugs slogan Crack is wack.

I go on to describe some of the ways the two words are used, and the possible limits of their interchangeability.

*

Enthusing about freedom of usage considers (and defends) the much-maligned back-formation enthuse:

Lots of words and usages are criticised or considered ‘incorrect’ when really they’re just colloquial, relatively new, or unsuited to formal use. As Michael Rundell wrote recently, ‘what might be inappropriate in a very formal setting may be perfectly acceptable in a conversation between friends’. . . .

What one generation finds ignorant or ridiculous, the next might adopt without fuss. Enthuse retains a semblance of impropriety, and is still frowned on by conservative writers and readers. Others, myself included, may have nothing against it but prefer periphrastic alternatives like ‘show enthusiasm’ or ‘be enthusiastic’.

The post details some of the criticism and commentary enthuse has received, and summarises its status in different varieties of English.

Older posts are available in my Macmillan Dictionary Blog archive.

I rarely post here twice in one day, but I have some news to share: Strong Language is a new group blog about swearing set up by sesquiotic linguist James Harbeck and me. This is how it started.

As James puts it, the blog:

gives a place for professional language geeks to talk about things they can’t talk about in more polite contexts. It’s a sweary blog about swearing.

At the bottom of the new blog you’ll see some familiar names among the contributors. More will be signing up, and we’re very open to ideas for new material. The associated Twitter account is @stronglang.

Some of you may find the idea unappealing, and will not wish to read further. I won’t hold it against you.

It’s early days, and we’re still figuring out the details, but there are several posts up already on a range of topics, including the phonology of cusswords, whether shit is a contronym, and one from me today on great moments of swearing in the horror film The Thing.

If swearing gives you lalochezia or interests you linguistically, culturally or ineffably, then bookmark, subscribe and follow at will, and spread the word if the notion takes you.

Remember the transformation of fail and win 5–6 years ago? Fleeting online slang phrases like bucket of fail and made of win may sound dated now, but terms like epic fail/win and FTW (“for the win”) and the words’ use as tags and hashtags remain popular. Fail and win have firmly, if informally, extended their grammatical domains, having been converted from verb to noun, interjection, and other categories.

A word undergoing comparable change is nope. Its metamorphosis over the last few years has in some ways been more impressive, but it seems less remarked on than fail and win – maybe because of its more limited distribution. For instance, this cartoon on Imgur (pronunciation note here), which shows Spider-Man shooting spiders from his hands, drew comments that use nope as a verb, adjective, and noun – mass and count – as well as duplicating, lengthening, and adverbifying it.

Some of the comments are listed below. A couple have swear words, so you might prefer to skip ahead if you’re likely to be offended by those:

Nopeman
NOPE. ONE BIG NOPE.
Just would be a whole lot of nope.
ive never seen this much nope in one gif
Nope train to fuckthatville
Spider Nope, Spider Nope, Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.
Oh look, it’s Nope O’clock
NOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPENOPE ABANDON THREAD
scientifically those are not “spiders”… nopefically those are “nopenopenopenopenopes”
well he noped the fuck out and I don’t blame him
NOPE NOOpEo eopeOepeoopepeooepoepoe.

The last string, with its deliberately warped duplication, can be seen as an expression of repudiation from someone so bothered by what they see that they pretend they can no longer control themselves enough to calmly spell nope. It’s analogous to the can’t even constructions popular in communicating stupefaction or powerful emotion online.

The verb phrase nope out, seen in the second-last item above with an intensifying swear, is a spin-off of the new nope. It can mean wimp out, especially in a gaming context, or just flee or get the hell away without implying cowardice or timidity. Lucy Ferriss at Lingua Franca sees noping out as “a front-runner for slang ubiquity in the next two years or so”. But plain nope is already at that stage in some quarters.

These newish uses of nope typically appear in replies or comments to distressing material (e.g., images and gifs of spiders, insects, snakes, or other dread-inducing creatures), often as variations on memes and catchphrases, playful noun phrases, or other innovative expressions.

Nope is also common in “reaction gifs” that show an animal, actor, or animated character making a dramatic or amusing escape from a bad situation:

*

*

*

Other nope-based reaction gifs feature a rabbit, dog, bearded dragon, badger, spider, gorilla, Muppets, llama, Anna Paquin, SpongeBob SquarePants, and other animated figures. There’s a lot of them.

To return to the text-only types, below are some further examples categorised by grammatical class, along with brief observations. All were found on Imgur; swear warning re-applies.

Verb:

The firefighter just calmly noped away.
Noping all the way home.
I noped so much that I quickly tried to change to the next page
I’d nope the F out of there, if I were you
Did not take me long to nope it the fuck off this page.
I NOPED myself.
That'[s] exactly where I noped away from that movie.
The nopes just keep noping out of the nope hole…

Note the synonymous use of nope [out of there] and nope it [off this page], and the recurrence of nope away (cf. nope out). Different senses of the verb nope, including the reflexive form nope oneself, are described further down.

Adjective:

I can’t even express how nope this is
It’s like a puppy stampede except noper.
What is so nope about snakes?
The nopest book art that exists.
Very poisonous. Very beautiful. Very nope.

Sometimes so nope, very nope, much nope and the like are examples of doge, but the last item above seems a straightforward adjectival use, given the pattern that precedes it.

Interjection:

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Noooooopppppee.
“nope” – Everyone ever
oh ha ha i see he’s playing with iOHFUCKNONOPENOPENOPE
Nope freaking nopity nope nope!
ahem *clears throat* NOOOOOPE! Nopedy nope nope!
NOOOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NUUUUUPE

Some of these interjectional uses show how nope is often repeated or lengthened to intensify the effect of rejection that it conveys.

Proper noun:

This should be retitled “The Nope Album”
Straight from the country of Nope.
Also know[n] as the Nopen Nope Noper nope, genus Nopeila
why aren’t you on the fuckthat train to nopesville?!
HOLY FUCKING MOTHER OF NOPE!
Loch Nope Monster
Yup, that’s definitely Lake Nope in the Holy Shit province of Fuck-that-istan

Noun:

So much nope
so many nopes
My god, look at all that nope!
For the sea is dark and full of nopes.
and here we have a nest of Nopes in their natural environment of the Fuckthat tree
The level of nope is too damn high!
You have a nope as a pet??!
That’s a giant cup of NOPE right there.
You may have all of my nope.
That’s eleven gallons of NOPE in a ten gallon hat.
Favorited for future nope.
And here you will see the 8 limbed NOPE
Honestly the water color is enough NOPE for me.
It should be A Game Of Nope And Fire.

The first two show succinctly how nope has become both a mass noun (so much nope) and a count noun (so many nopes). The Game of Nope and Fire quip, as well as combining Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire with the “game of nope” in the thread title, also alludes to the Kill it with fire! response common with this kind of material. You can also see the recurrence of playful combinations with fuckthat.

Compounds:

As some[o]ne who can science, i can positively identify this as a nopefish
That is a nopesnake.
that’s not morning, it’s nopetime.
Ah, the infamous Nopetree, growing in certain parts of Nope-istan.
NopeCreature in Nopehouse in Nopeland.
Oh, that’s the nopespider. It lives in noperica.

Assorted affixation and wordplay:

The nopification process.
allmynopes.jpg
Nopely nopent noping spider
It’s moving because NOPE
abso-fucking-nopely
The morning dew really accents the nopeness on this Nope Bush.

Because NOPE is an example of the because X construction I looked at last year.

This exuberant extension of nope is not limited to Imgur (though it’s a good place to browse examples: some pages have 100+); it’s also popular on Tumblr, Reddit, 4chan, and other image-heavy forums.

Some nope memes have been around a few years, and the word features in all sorts of image macros, often mixed with other fads and in-jokes. Archer’s use of nope is more like normal no, but the particular intonation there may have influenced some of the spellings elsewhere.

Given its frequency, some people are understandably tired of nope. One Imgurian protests, “Can we stop using the phrase ‘nope’ to refer to bugs and shit? It was funny in 2011, now it’s just annoying.” While it may be a subcultural cliché, nope is a rich source of both lexical and grammatical experimentation, which makes it pretty interesting linguistically.

As well as its morphological and syntactic versatility, the semantics of nope have also spread to encompass a range of referents. As a noun, it can refer to the object of dread (“baby nopes are kinda cute”; “much nope is contained in these books”), and to a person’s negative reaction to that object (“You may have all of my nope”; “it took ignoring the majority of my nopes to put my finger there for scale”).

In one example of the latter sense, a creepy lock of hair prompted a remark about Asian horror films (probably The Ring), to which a commenter replied: *NOPE INTENSIFIES*. This throwaway remark inadvertently sums up an aspect of the nope phenomenon; the ambiguity of my post title might make more sense now. I’ve also seen similar phrases such as noping intensifies and nopes intensify.

As a verb, nope can refer to getting quickly away (“He noped so hard, he was never heard from again”), scaring other people with a “nope” (“DON’T NOPE ME THEN TRY TO EARN MY TRUST WITH YOUR PET!!!!!”), soiling oneself with fright (“I think I just noped myself”), declining something nopeworthy (“I’m just gonna nope the link and believe you, and move on”), to something a “nope” does (“a giant herd of nopes noping at my heels”), and so on.

In his 2009 Word Routes post about the transformation of awesome, fail, win and co., Ben Zimmer noted a common thread in these “mass-nounified words”: that they “can have the force of an interjection”. Nope wasn’t a verb to begin with, and it already had interjectional qualities, but its use has broadened similarly and its sound and structure make it very open to inflection, affixation, and other kinds of creative mutation.

Used to reject utterly and forcefully an upsetting image, scenario, or idea, nope has manoeuvred itself into an endless array of grammatical and lexical forms. No category leap seems beyond it, no catchphrase safe from potential nope-jacking. In the infectious, rapid-fire wordplay of web forums like Imgur, nope has quickly established itself as a signature term and one spawning constant novelty and repetition.

Whether it declines like an old grey spider, or spreads further like a brood of baby ones in the wind, remains to be seen.

Australian English has a famous tendency to abbreviate words, doing so frequently and in a variety of ways. Clipping comes first, then the stump may be suffixed with an -er, -o, -s, -ie or -y, etc. This can and does occur in any form of English, but Australians seem to have taken diminutives furthest: it’s an unmistakable feature of the dialect.

Peter Temple’s Truth is an Australian crime novel with an abundance of such terms, and as I read it I decided to note some of them. The book, incidentally, is outstanding: the generic phrase crime novel utterly fails to capture this eloquent and ambitious morality tale. Anyway: to begin with -o forms. Truth offers several, usually in dialogue:

‘…get someone to take down every rego in the parking garage’ (registration, i.e., car number plate)

‘…years ago, you rings the cops, the ambos, they come.’ (ambulances ambulance paramedics)

‘If my old man had been a garbo, I’d be labouring on a building site.’ (garbage collector)

‘And have the Salvos take a walk around there,’ said Villani. (Salvation Army)

‘Told you at the servo then, you don’t fucken listen.’ (service station, i.e., gas station or petrol station)

People’s names commonly get the -o treatment: there’s a Tommo and a Stevo, Burgess becomes Burgo, Singleton Singo, Ribarics Ribbos. Myxomatosis is reduced to myxo, while boy as a form of address becomes boyo – not an abbreviation but worth including in this context.

The -ie/-y ending seems even more popular. Some examples used in Temple’s book, such as mozzies (mosquitoes), druggies (drug addicts) and vegies (vegetables) are more or less part of global English, but others are more restricted:

He took sunnies out of his denim jacket… (sunglasses)

‘Scare you, this shotty?’ (shotgun)

‘Stuff like this, the media blowies on you, bloody pollies pestering, the ordinary work goes to hell.’ (blowflies, politicians)

‘…associating with murdering bikie scum’ (biker)

They walked across the concrete yard, chatting side-on, could be tradies coming on site. (tradesmen, i.e., trade workers)

‘Across the road come and put a cushie under me head, held me hand.’ (cushion)

‘Lots of little buggers in there now,’ said Bob one day. ‘Echidnas, bandis, God knows where they come from.’ (bandicoots)

Searle’s the worry here, he’d like to see me buried. Whole Searle family’d have a wakey. (wake)

‘Yeah, a man said he was a relly.’ (relative)

‘Rose’s street was mostly pensioners, everything spent on rent, cigarettes, the pokies…’ (poker machines, i.e., fruit machines or slot machines)

Place names and proper names get similar treatment: Brisbane is Brissie, Tasmania Tassie, Crown beers are Crownies and Blundstone boots Blunnies. The police force’s Special Operations Group is acronymised to SOG (pronounced ‘sog’ at least sometimes: ‘better than a SOG move on Kidd’s premises’ [not an SOG]), and its members are occasionally, inescapably, soggies.

Finally there’s the delightful saddies, a nominalisation of sad:

‘Got the saddies, mate?’

Inveterate critics of slang and youthspeak would love to hate on teens for using such a trivial and seemingly unnecessary word, but saddies here is spoken by a seasoned officer. It’s no more trendy than got the morbs, which sounds like a novel clipping but in fact had currency in the late 19th century. To borrow from Buffy, it gives me a happy.

Additional such abbreviations can be found at the Australian National Dictionary Centre’s page on Australian English vocabulary. Why they have become such a characteristic part of the dialect is not clear, [edit:] but slang lexicographer Jonathon Green tells me it may all have started with the late-19thC rabbit-o ‘rabbit seller’.

Back in December I introduced Strong Language, a new group blog about the use, culture, and linguistics of profanity cooked up by James Harbeck and me. While some of you are now regular readers, others may be unaware of it or glad of a reminder or an update, so this post can address that. The language below may offend, so caveat lector.

Strong Language started well and this year has gone from strength to sweary strength. We’ve redesigned its appearance, partnered with Slate’s Lexicon Valley, and added more writers to the team of regular contributors. The @stronglang Twitter account ties in with the blog but does its own stuff too, such as film stills and swearwords of the day.

I’ve written ten posts for Strong Language and have as many more in various stages of completion or planning. Published posts look at filthy old songs, Irish English shite, multilingual swearing, and Rob Chirico’s book Damn!, among other things. I also compile ‘Sweary links’ – like the ‘Link love’ posts here on Sentence first, but swearing-related.

Other SLers have written about how many swears we have not given (Stephen Chrisomalis), the trouble with retard(ed) (Iva Cheung), rude phrases for cold weather (Karen Conlin), masturbatory slang (Jonathon Green), the intensifying affixal -shit, (Kory Stamper), a sweary primer on pragmatics (James Harbeck), DIY oathmaking (Daniel Sosnoski), mother _uckers in branding (Nancy Friedman), the culture of swear jars (John Kelly), St Patrick’s bad language (Terry O’Hagan), and when shit hits the newspapers (Ben Zimmer).

That’s just a flavour – there are over 80 posts so far, and new ones appear regularly, if unpredictably. That of course is part of the fun: it’s a constant pleasure to see what people come up with next and the enthusiasm and flair with which they pull it off. So if you’re interested in language that is rude, vulgar, taboo, and profane, go forth and visit, subscribe, bookmark, blog-roll (is that a verb yet?), and spread the bad word about Strong Language.

After a binge of Ed McBain books a few months ago – they often touch on linguistic topics – this week I picked another of his 87th Precinct series off the unread shelf: Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man (1973). It uses a form of the Yiddish word kibitz twice in short succession:

In the April sunshine four fat men sit at a chess table in the park across the street from the university. All four of the men are wearing dark cardigan sweaters. Two of the men are playing chess, and two of them are kibitzing, but the game has been going on for so many Sundays now that it seems almost as though they are playing four-handed, the players and the kibitzers indistinguishable one from the other.

Kibitz is a handy word that means to watch someone do something (normally a game, often cards) and offer unwelcome advice. It can also simply mean ‘to chat’. The word entered English almost a century ago via multiple languages, thieves’ cant, and ornithological onomatopoeia. This delightful etymology is summarised at Etymonline:

1927, from Yiddish kibitsen “to offer gratuitous advice as an outsider,” from German kiebitzen “to look on at cards, to kibitz,” originally in thieves’ cant “to visit,” from Kiebitz, name of a shore bird (European pewit, lapwing) with a folk reputation as a meddler, from Middle High German gibitz “pewit,” imitative of its cry.

At this point I would normally offer some general comments about the word, but Stuart Brown got there first and put it perfectly at his blog A Progressive Rake, in a recent post on the ‘wonderfully satisfying’ Yiddish loan-words kvetch, klutz, and kibitz:

The consonant conjuncts they offer are meaty and enjoyable, and they seem to have an pleasurable specificity in meaning: providing that satisfying feeling of having found exactly the right term that you required. But the problem with them, as a Brit, is lack of exposure. . . . Consequentially I only use a few of them, and then with care, because for many I am uncertain of precisely those specifics of inference that I so relish. This is a shame, because I would love to have a few Yiddish epithets that I could apply to myself.

Ditto from this Irishman, who knows bupkes about most Yiddishisms.

A houseboat is a type of boat; a boathouse is a type of house.

This illustrates a common pattern in English morphology: the rightmost part of a compound (houseboat) is usually the ‘head’. In other words it’s the centre or larger category, functionally equivalent to the overall compound, and what precedes it (houseboat) modifies or specifies it. So we say English is ‘right-headed’.

But the semantic relationship between the parts can’t be inferred automatically from their arrangement, as this charming/disarming Bizarro cartoon by Dan Piraro shows:

Right-headedness is a feature of Germanic languages. Romance languages tend to reverse the order: chaise longue is a type of chaise, lingua franca a type of lingua. Either way, when a compound includes the head it is called endocentric – the centre is internal. In exocentric compounds the head is missing or external: a bigmouth is not a type of mouth and an egghead is not a type of head – both refer to people.

Editor and historical linguist Brianne Hughes studies a remarkable subset of exocentric compounds called agentive and instrumental exocentric verb-noun (V-N) compounds. Mercifully, and memorably, she calls them cutthroat compounds, or cutthroats for short. These are rare in English word-formation but have a long, colourful history and constitute a very interesting category.

Cutthroat compounds name things or people by describing what they do. A cutthroat cuts throats, a telltale tells tales, a wagtail wags its tail, a killjoy kills joy, a scarecrow scares crows, a turncoat turns their coat, rotgut rots the gut, a pickpocket picks pockets, a sawbones saws bones (one of the few plural by default), and breakfast – lest you miss its etymology, hidden in plain sight – breaks a fast. The verb is always transitive, the noun its direct object.

[poster of Robert Bresson’s classic film Pickpocket (1959) via this collection]

Despite the familiarity of these examples, only a few dozen are current in modern English. It’s because they conflict with the right-headedness of English, Brianne writes in her master’s thesis (‘From Turncoats To Backstabbers: How Headedness and Word Order Determine the Productivity of Agentive and Instrumental Compounding in English’), that cutthroats’ productivity will never surpass that of ‘backstabber’ compounds, which use the far more usual N-V-er pattern. We’re ‘book readers’, not ‘readbooks’; ‘word lovers’, not ‘lovewords’.

Cutthroats largely constitute ‘a treasury of nonce words’, having peaked centuries ago. Survivors tend to be peripheral, found in slang, regional dialects, and children’s short-lived innovations. But Brianne is on a mission to catalogue them and has recorded several hundred, including such malicious archaic marvels as want-wit (stupid person), spoil-paper (bad writer), whiparse (abusive teacher), eat-bee (bird), lacklooks (unattractive person), stretchgut (glutton), clutchfist (miser), and catch-fart (servant who walks behind their master).

One I’ve always liked is smell-feast, meaning someone who sniffs out a feast and comes uninvited to share in it. The OED’s first citation for this word, from 1519, refers to ‘smellefyestes, lycke dysshes, and franchars [who] come vncalled’. Franchars derives from franch, an obsolete word meaning ‘feed greedily’, while the more transparent ‘lycke dysshes’ counts as another cutthroat. Here is Brianne on their general status:

Cutthroats are freely productive in Romance languages, which have a V.O. (verb-object) structure and are left-headed. English, which is V.O. and right-headed, has slight native productivity (Clark et al, 1986) that has been amplified and augmented by French borrowings (e.g., coupe-gorge [cutthroat] and wardecorps [bodyguard]). English has been slowly producing new cutthroats since the 1200s up through 2015, mainly in the form of nonce personal insults. Most cutthroats are obsolete slang, but about 40, including ​pickpocket​, pinchpenny, rotgut​ and​ spitfire, are commonly known in Modern English.

Hunting them down and determining their cutthroat status can be tricky, since there’s no formula to determine how a compound’s parts relate to each other. This is the subject of a presentation Brianne will give at the SHEL/DSNA conference in Vancouver in June (‘Does a Slingshot Sling Shots? Difficulties in Identifying English Cutthroat Compounds’), from whose Abstract the quotation above is taken. For more on this see Laurie Bauer, ‘English Exocentric Compounds’ (PDF).

Finding them is aggravated by the fact that they tend not to appear in standard dictionaries or well-documented areas. But they do clump semantically: mainly as insults, occupational names, and provincial nature-words. Brianne divides them into six categories: people (insults, occupations, insulted occupations – sometimes as surnames); games; tools; food and drink; plants and animals (including twitchbell, which James Joyce incorporated into Finnegans Wake); and adjectives such as lacklustre, breakneck, and breakteeth (= ‘difficult to pronounce’).

So far she has identified 846 cutthroats, and maybe more by the time you read this. Finding one can lead to another, thus kill-priest (port wine) → strangle-priest → strangle-goose​ →​ saddle-goose →​ saddle-nag. Some verbs recur: break, turn, lack and pick all appear in over a dozen, choke in at least five: chokepriest (thick Italian soup), choke-sparrow (bearded wheat), choke-dog (hard cheese), choke-children (bony fish), and choke-jade (a place in England).

The pattern, though rare nowadays, is not completely unproductive in English. Children go through a phase of compound acquisition in which they invent cutthroats spontaneously before dropping the habit again. By email Brianne shared a few modern ones she has spotted in comics and other pop cultural domains, such as Princess Tinglepants, Professor Stealwater, and pesterchum (a messaging app). Among her vintage favourites, complete with her glosses, are:

Kick-shins: a children’s game

Swingebreech: a haughty swaggerer (who swings their hips while walking); related: shit-breech, quakebreech, shuffle-breeches

Fuckbottere: occupational last name where fuck means ‘strike’ and bottere is butter – an agrarian worker. (I believe one of the earliest instances of fuck.)

The insulting kinds, Brianne says, ‘cut right to what makes people unlikeable’. She loves their brutal honesty and finds that they tend to stand out and endure despite their low productivity. She feels cutthroats of all kinds have been unjustly overlooked, only ever ‘briefly mentioned in English compounding chapters, with the same examples over and over. Why aren’t there more? Why do they exist at all?’ These questions she addressed in some detail in her thesis.

I salute her quest to shine a light on what she calls a shadowy footnote of English morphology, and I highly recommend this short talk she gave in 2013, which offers more examples of cutthroats both contemporary and archaic, celebrates their curious nature, and briefly documents their shifting popularity over the centuries:

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You can download the slides here. For a historical overview of exocentric V-N compounds in English and German, see Volker Gast 2008 (PDF):

There was (probably) a certain inventory of relevant items even before the Norman conquest, esp. in proper names and epithets. Under French influence, the pattern was ‘upgraded’, i.e. it became more productive and frequent and was used in more (esp. higher) registers. The productivity of exocentric V-N compounds increased steadily in the 14th and 15th centuries and reached a peak in the 16th century (e.g. kill-courtesy, lack-brain, lack-beard in Shakespeare). From the 17th century onwards, its productivity decreased considerably, resulting in the status quo of the contemporary language, where an inventory of relevant forms is still preserved, but hardly any new words are created.

The decline of exocentric V-N compounds was accompanied, and perhaps partly also caused, by a strong increase of ‘synthetic compounds’ of the form N-V-er. The two types have existed side by side for many centuries, sometimes providing alternative terms for one meaning (e.g. breakstone [1688] and stone-breaker [1827]). However, at the time of the Industrial Revolution synthetic compounds gained ground and took over great parts of the denotational domain previously covered by exocentric V-N compounds.

Gast looks at other European languages in a subsequent paper (PDF), which includes this graph showing the diverging fates of V-N and N-V-er compounds in English:

(Synthetic is explained here.)

Finally, if you want yet more exocentric pleasure, watch Chris Magyar’s half-hour comic talk where he riffs on why exocentric compounds appeal to him and why twinkletoes most of all:

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Molly Keane’s exceptional and darkly comic novel Good Behaviour (1981) has a telling passage on euphemisms for toilet in upper-class Anglo-Irish society a century or so ago. The first paragraph below is not of immediate linguistic interest but supplies context for what follows and no little amusement in its own right.

The narrator, a memorably antisocial creation, reports on her brother’s visit to the hospital when they were both children:

They took Hubert off to Cork that same night, and he had an appendix and tubes and nearly died. I prayed night and day for his recovery and that he might get a reprieve from pain. Constantly with me was the thought of his black hair, peaked on his forehead, smooth on his head as if painted on an egg. As I cleaned out his budgies and his mice his eyes haunted my work – his eyes that never lit and sparkled as blue eyes should, as I knew mine would, if only they were big and blue.

When at last he came home he was a very great disappointment to me. The nuns in the nursing home had spoiled him so that he was really unbearably demanding, sending me in all directions and inventing tasks for me while he lay on a chaise longue under the cedar tree with lemonade constantly at his elbow. In those days thrombosis had not been heard of, and invalids, young and old, were allowed a comfortable rest after their operations. Hubert even had a po in the bushes “in case.” Another thing these kind nuns had done was to teach him to say “the toilet” when he meant the po or the lavatory, which was a vulgarity no one seemed able to straighten out. If circumstances forced Mrs. Brock to mention it she called it the Place. “Have you been to the Place, dear?” or “Have you been?” Or else “Hubert, shouldn’t you run along the passage?” when Hubert was fidgeting frighteningly from foot to foot.

Entire books have been written about the social history of toilets and our many words for them and for what we do in and around them. Polite society prefers that we mask such activities in incongruous concoctions like ‘powdering one’s nose’; restroom, washroom, tearoom, cloakroom and (again) powder room suggest a whole host of things one might do in these rooms that are not what one is actually doing. Even bathroom is purposely coy. Slang meanwhile provides endless terms that delight in the very grubbiness of the same activities.

The po in Keane’s text refers to a chamber pot, from French pot de chambre. I assumed it was an old usage, but the OED dates it only to the late 19thC, labelling it colloquial. The monosyllabic can, head, jakes and john are all popular synonyms for the bathrooms or toilets of different English-speaking communities; bog is one of many terms common in Ireland, but I never adopted it. Jacks I use less than I once did; loo is probably the word I use most often – at least in familiar company. And I will never use little boys’/girls’ room. What do you say?

Updates:

A few comments about this from Twitter:

Andrew Szmelter: ‘Visitor at work needed a slash so primly asked the receptionist where the cloakroom was. She told him there wasn’t one.’

Orlaith Finnegan: ‘Years ago when I was working in the Frascati centre in Blackrock a posh old lady asked me where the water closet was. It was the first time I heard someone say water closet and didn’t make the connection at all. WC is also used in France.’

Aoife McLysaght: ‘I can still picture the look of disgust that I received in a Californian restaurant when I asked for directions to the toilet. I also still bristle when I recall my 4th class teacher [a nun] humiliating a girl in my class because she asked to go to “the bathroom”. The teacher replied with “Is there a bath in it? Why are you calling it a bathroom?” It was in a very snarky tone. Very mean. Also happened to be one of two girls in the class who was from a Council Estate, so I feel it was just an excuse to pick on her.’

Hooray! Jonathon Green has compiled the timeline of slang terms – his 24th – for all things toilet-related.

At Macmillan Dictionary Blog, I review a list of ‘words you’re using wrong’ from – unusually for this sort of thing – a linguist.

Appraising Pinker’s prescriptions shows that Stephen Pinker has good advice on foreign plurals and some confusable pairs of words. But on other items his guidance seems unduly strict. For example:

The article insists that begs the question ‘does not mean raises the question’. But outside of philosophical contexts, it nearly always does – whether you like it or not. And it says literally ‘does not mean figuratively’ – but people seldom if ever use it that way: the disputed use is when literally intensifies something that may be figurative.

The article says fulsome ‘does not mean full or copious’ – but it can. It says refute ‘does not mean to allege to be false’ – but this is a preference, not an accurate description of how refute is used. Disinterested, we’re told, ‘means unbiased and does not mean uninterested’, but in fact the word commonly has both meanings – and despite claims of ambiguity, these multiple senses don’t generally interfere with clear communication.

Read the rest for further analysis and my conclusions and recommendations.

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In today’s post at Macmillan, Your new favourite slang rebuts the knee-jerk reaction against slang and other new informal usages, advising tolerance and patience with people’s language.

It also looks at what new words and phrases people (including me) have been adding to their everyday speech:

I haven’t added bae or fleek to my active vocabulary, and have no immediate plans to, but I have added other new usages. I find hangry (and the related noun hanger) a handy jocular word to describe the feeling of irritation due to hunger. Other relatively new additions to my idiolect include because X and throw shade – though on the occasions I use these I do so chiefly online, where they’re more familiar to people.

Curious about what new usages other people have adopted, especially in speech, I asked on Twitter and got lots of interesting replies . . .

You can click through to read them and offer your own suggestions. Older posts can be browsed in my Macmillan Dictionary Blog archive.

Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) is a monumental work by any standard. Published in six volumes from 1898–1905, with detailed entries across 4505 double-columned pages, it’s all the more impressive given that its author was largely self-taught and could not read until his mid-teens. (He described himself as ‘an idle man all my life’.)

After studying philology in Germany, Wright began his pioneering work in English dialectology, aiming in the EDD to include ‘the complete vocabulary of dialect words’ in use since 1700. The Oxford Companion to the English Language says ‘nothing of comparable breadth or depth of dialect scholarship has been published in Britain since’.

The EDD is available in various formats at the Internet Archive, but those hefty PDFs can be unwieldy. The good news – great news, for word lovers – is that the book has finally been digitised and is now free and ready to use ‘by all private people, researchers, students and amateurs’. Just accept the terms of use – respect the EDD Online’s special copyright – and away you go.

The director of the five-year project is German/Austrian professor emeritus Manfred Markus of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, which hosts the digitised dictionary. It was financed by the Austrian Research Fund. Markus’s manual (PDF) has background on the work as well as guidance on its use. So if the interface seems a little daunting, consult his instructions.

I haven’t had time yet to explore the EDD Online properly, but I’ve dipped in and it seems to work very well. The use of filters allows for complex and sophisticated searches by type, region, and so on, while the ‘last result’ box enables piggy-back queries: searches within the previous results. Markus gives an example of what you can do:

It will also be possible to combine the class of variants with that of the headwords and thus, by way of a regional filters, generate regional glossaries. This is achieved with the help of the Last-result button. . . . For example, if the combination of headword with dialect, say Yorkshire, produces 7,000 results of headwords – which means that the entries of these headwords somewhere contain the abbreviations for Yorkshire – , then it may occur to the user to start a new query on this subset of entries to find out which of the compounds, combinations and derivations in these entries are affiliated with Scandinavian (Norvegian, Swedish etc.) origin. With the help of this Last-result tool the complexity of queries can be carried to an extreme.

Whether you’re into extreme dialect-digging or just want to scratch the historical surface of local vernacular, the English Dialect Dictionary Online is worth bookmarking and is a laudable public and scholarly resource.

Thanks to Jonathon Green for the tip-off.

I have an article in the Guardian this week in response to yet another school cracking down on students’ use of slang, regional dialect, and informal language. It’s in the Opinion section and is titled There’s nowt wrong with dialects, nothing broke ass about slang.

(Pretend there’s a hyphen in broke-ass.) Here’s an excerpt:

Standard English is a prestige dialect of huge social value. It’s important that students learn it. But the common belief that nonstandard means substandard is not just false but damaging, because it fosters prejudice and hostility. Young people can be taught formal English, and understand its great cultural utility, without being led to believe there’s something inferior or shameful about other varieties. . . .

People feel strongly about correctness in language, but this strength of feeling isn’t always matched by knowledge and tolerance. And because children are sensitive to how they’re perceived, stigmatising their everyday speech can be harmful. By educating them about linguistic diversity instead of proscribing it, we can empower students and deter misguided pedantry.

I’ve been reading the Guardian for as long as I can remember, so I’m glad to finally write something for it. (That split infinitive is a bonus.) The comments section is proving lively, as you’d expect, and I’m joining in here and there. Your thoughts are welcome at either location.

Update:

John E. McIntyre follows up at the Baltimore Sun, where he elaborates on ‘why schoolteachers’ policing of language is so misguided’.

Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York (2002) has a special feature on the DVD called ‘Five Points Vocabulary’. Five Points is a reference to the Manhattan district where the film is set, and the vocabulary is a glossary of slang from that era (1840s–60s) and place.

It looks like this:

The glossary is spread over eight such pages, so rather than add images, I’ve compiled the text below. Fair warning: it’s slang, and therefore not politically correct.

Amusers: fellows who carry snuff or pepper in their pockets, which they throw into a person’s eyes and then run away.

Anglers: small thieves who place a hook on the end of a stick, with which they steal from store windows, doors, etc.

Autum-divers: pickpockets who practice in churches.

Ballum-rancum: a ball where all the dancers are thieves and prostitutes.

Bene: good, first-rate.

Bludget: a female thief who decoys her victims into dark alleys to rob them.

Boarding–school: a penitentiary.

Cove: a man.

Crusher: a policeman.

Cutter: a peculiar instrument that first-class burglars use for cutting through iron chests, doors, etc.

Dancing: sneaking upstairs to commit a larceny.

Fidlam bens: thieves who have no particular lay; fellows that will steal anything they can remove.

Gander: a married man not living at home with this wife.

Groaners: thieves who attend at charity sermons and rob the congregation, steal the prayer books, etc.

Handle: a nose.

High tide: plenty of money.

Jack sprat: a small fellow.

Jigger: a door.

Laced mutton: a common woman.

Lurch: abandon.

Moneker: a name.

Mort: a woman.

Nimenog: a very silly fellow.

Partial: putting one’s hand into another man’s pocket, stealing.

Polisher: one who is in prison.

Prim: a handsome woman.

Quartered: to receive a part of the profits.

Queen dick: never; it never happened.

Rabbit: a rowdy (dead rabbit: a very athletic rowdy fellow).

Roughs: men who are ready to fight in any way or shape.

Sand: nerve, guts.

She–he: a transvestite.

Sneak–thief: a fellow who sneaks into doors or windows with latchkeys and steals anything he can carry.

Stag: one who has turned State’s evidence.

Star–gazer: a prostitute or streetwalker.

Steppling–ken: a dance house.

Swag: plunder.

Tumbled: suspected, found it out.

Turtle–dovers: a pair of gloves.

Wooden–coat: a coffin.

It’s a curious, colourful set. Some are obvious loanwords, such as bene from Italian; others are more obscure or have a more characteristically underground flavour (crusher, wooden-coat). A few, like sneak thief and swag, are in more or less standard use today.

The entries appear to be from Vocabulum; or, The Rogue’s Lexicon, an 1859 dictionary of criminal cant by George Washington Matsell – New York’s first police chief. If you have an appetite for this kind of thing, you can browse or download the whole book from the Internet Archive.

In his slang history Language! 500 Years of the Vulgar Tongue, Jonathon Green writes that American cant in Matsell’s time ‘still appears to have been apeing its English origins’. He says Matsell ‘seems to have got it right’, citing reports that both criminals and police officers confirmed the authenticity of the Vocabulum‘s lexicon. (Matsell’s legacy as an agent of the law is a bit shadier.)

There’s no shortage of films of linguistic interest, but it’s not often I see a purely linguistic feature on a DVD. In fact, it’s the only one I can think of off the top of my head. If you know of others, let me know in a comment.

A quarter-century after publication seemed a good time to revisit Douglas Coupland’s self-consciously zeitgeisty novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. It remains a rewarding read, inventive and humorous, with a sincerity unspoiled by its often sardonic views.

A salient feature of the book is an ingenious, comical, cultural glossary supplementing the text as it unfolds. For example: Ultra short term nostalgia (unhyphenated in the book) is ‘homesickness for the extremely recent past: God, things seemed so much better in the world last week.’ This had special resonance after the UK’s Brexit vote last month, as did Historical Overdosing:

To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.

(The symptoms for Historical Underdosing are the same.)

Some of the near-100 such entries, like McJob – the first in the book – have become established in broader usage. The OED cites Generation X in its entry for McJob, but credits a Washington Post headline from 1986 as the first use.

It’s worth comparing the two glosses: where the OED is appropriately disinterested and concise, Coupland adds wry sociological insight:

OED on McJob: An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector.

Coupland on McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.

Below is a selection of entries from Coupland’s Generation X lexicon (Xicon?), in the order they appear in the book. Some are obviously aimed at the era; others have more cross-generational application. If you haven’t read the book and are curious based on these snippets or on its reputation, I can recommend it.

Emotional Ketchup Burst: The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside oneself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends – most of whom thought things were fine.

Clique Maintenance: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: “Kids today do nothing. They’re so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.”

Consensus Terrorism: The process that decides in-office attitudes and behavior.

Power Mist: The tendency of hierarchies in office environments to be diffuse and preclude crisp articulation.

Overboarding: Overcompensating for fears about the future by plunging headlong into a job or life-style seemingly unrelated to one’s previous interests; i.e., Amway sales, aerobics, the Republican Party, a career in law, cults, McJobs. . . .

Anti-Sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions.

Bambification: The mental conversion of flesh-and-blood living creatures into cartoon creatures possessing bourgeois Judeo-Christian attitudes and morals.

Diseases for Kisses (Hyperkarma): A deeply rooted belief that punishment will somehow always be far greater than the crime: ozone holes for littering.

Spectacularism: A fascination with extreme situations.

Lessness: A philosophy whereby one reconciles oneself with diminishing expectations of material wealth: “I’ve given up wanting to make a killing or be a bigshot. I just want to find happiness and maybe open up a little roadside cafe in Idaho.”

Status Substitution: Using an object with intellectual or fashionable cachet to substitute for an object that is merely pricey: “Brian, you left your copy of Camus in your brother’s BMW.”

Mental Ground Zero: The location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb; frequently, a shopping mall.

Cult of Aloneness: The need for autonomy at all costs, usually at the expense of long-term relationships. Often brought about by overly high expectations of others.

Celebrity Schadenfreude: Lurid thrills derived from talking about celebrity deaths.

Personal Tabu: A small rule for living, bordering on a superstition, that allows one to cope with everyday life in the absence of cultural or religious dictums.

Musical Hairsplitting: The act of classifying music and musicians into pathologically picayune categories: “The Vienna Franks are a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska.”

101-ism: The tendency to pick apart, often in minute detail, all aspects of life using half-understood pop psychology as a tool.

Rebellion Postponement: The tendency in one’s youth to avoid traditionally youthful activities and artistic experiences in order to obtain serious career experience. Sometimes results in the mourning for lost youth at about age thirty, followed by silly haircuts and expensive joke-inducing wardrobes.

Conspicuous Minimalism: A life-style tactic similar to Status Substitution. The nonownership of material goods flaunted as a token of moral and intellectual superiority.

Café Minimalism: To espouse a philosophy of minimalism without actually putting into practice any of its tenets.

Squirming: Discomfort inflicted upon young people by old people who see no irony in their gestures. Karen died a thousand deaths as her father made a big show of tasting a recently manufactured bottle of wine before allowing it to be poured as the family sat in Steak Hut.

Conversational slumming: The self-conscious enjoyment of a given conversation precisely for its lack of intellectual rigor.

Occupational Slumming: Taking a job beneath one’s skills or education level as a means of retreat from adult responsibilities and/or avoiding possible failure in one’s true occupation.

Tele-parablizing: Morals used in everyday life that derive from TV sitcom plots: “That’s just like the episode where Jan lost her glasses.”

Me-ism: A search by an individual, in the absence of training in traditional religious tenets, to formulate a personally tailored religion by himself. Most frequently a mishmash of reincarnation, personal dialogue with a nebulously defined god figure, naturalism, and karmic eye-for-eye attitudes.

Strangelove Reproduction: Having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future.

Underdogging: The tendency to almost invariably side with the underdog in a given situation. The consumer expression of this trait is the purchasing of less successful, “sad,” or failing products: “I know these Vienna franks are heart failure on a stick, but they were so sad looking up against all the other yuppie food items that I just had to buy them.”

2 + 2 = 5-ism: Caving in to a target marketing strategy aimed at oneself after holding out for a long period of time. “Oh, all right, I’ll buy your stupid cola. Now leave me alone.”

Option Paralysis: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.

Personality Tithe: A price paid for becoming a couple; previously amusing human beings become boring: “Thanks for inviting us, but Noreen and I are going to look at flatware catalogs tonight. Afterward we’re going to watch the shopping channel.”

Derision Preemption: A life-style tactic; the refusal to go out on any sort of emotional limb so as to avoid mockery from peers.

Dumpster Clocking: The tendency when looking at objects to guesstimate the amount of time they will take to eventually decompose: “Ski boots are the worst. Solid plastic. They’ll be around till the sun goes super nova.”

Metaphasia: An inability to perceive metaphor.

Obscurism: The practice of peppering daily life with obscure references (forgotten films, dead TV stars, unpopular book, defunct countries, etc.) as a subliminal means of showcasing both one’s education and one’s wish to disassociate from the world of mass culture.

Expatriate Solipsism: When arriving in a foreign travel destination one had hoped was undiscovered, only to find many people just like oneself; the peeved refusal to talk to said people because they had ruined one’s elitist travel fantasy.

Coupland’s book has many more.

It’s over a year since I blogged about Strong Language. Time to recap.

For the uninitiated, Strong Language is a group blog about swearing – the linguistics and culture of taboo language – set up by James Harbeck and me in 2014. It boasts a great team of writers comprising linguists, lexicographers, historians, editors, and other word adepts.

There are swears in this post, so bail out now if they bother you.

So far I’ve published 29 posts on the blog – some of them guest posts I’ve edited, including one last week by Michael Adams on Donald Trump’s swearing. Our busiest day yet was 1 August last year: over 30,000 people read my post ‘Mapping the United Swears of America’ after it was featured in the Washington Post and other outlets.

I’ve also written about sweary films (visual swears, swear avoidance), sweary songs (Four Femmes; Flight of the Conchords), sweary video games, sweary Sean Bean, sweary abbreviations, bollocking data, fucking ambiguity, and more sweary maps.

Total posts now top 200. There’s Iva Cheung’s sweary oddities, Nancy Friedman’s bawdy brands, John Kelly’s sweary Shakespeare, Gretchen McCulloch’s expletive infixes, Lauren Gawne’s rude gestures, Ben Zimmer’s learnèd lewdness, Rob Chirico’s cultures of cursing, Anne Gilson LaLonde’s scandalous trademarks, Terry O’Hagan’s Irish imprecations, James Harbeck’s obscenaesthetic observations, and many other vulgar delights.

James and I were recently interviewed about Strong Language, and about swearing, on WordPress’s Discover blog, where the comments – like those on our sweary blog – show a general appreciation for and fascination with profanity.

Strong Language is not for everyone, but if you share our interest in taboo vocabulary and such things, take a look. You can also follow @stronglang on Twitter for more regular items of a profane nature.

Cartoon by George Belcher for Punch, 1921. Caption:

Lady: “Is is really necessary to use such dreadful expressions whilst you are at work?”

Plumber: “No, mum, it ain’t exactly necessary, but the quality of the work will suffer if we don’t.”

I’m slowly catching up on the back catalogue of George Pelecanos, who has written about 20 crime fiction novels (and also wrote for The Wire). Recently I read Hell to Pay (2002), which contains several items of linguistic or metalinguistic interest.

The book is one of a handful by Pelecanos that centre on private detectives Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, the first black, the second white, the two ex-cops.

Terry Quinn goes looking for information from sex workers. He bums a cigarette as a way into conversation, but being a non-smoker he has nothing to light it with. Then he encounters Stella, a ‘pale’ girl ‘maybe knocking on the door of seventeen’:

She sat down without invitation. He handed her the cigarette.

‘You got a light?’

‘Sorry.’

‘You need a new rap,’ she said, rooting through her shoulder bag for a match. Finding a book, she struck a flame and put fire to the cigarette. ‘The one you got is lame.’

‘You think so?’

‘You be hittin’ those girls up for a smoke, you don’t ask ’em for a light, you don’t even have a match your own self?’

Quinn took in the girl’s words, the rhythms, the dropping of the g’s, the slang. Like that of most white girls selling it on the street, her speech was an affectation, a strange in-and-out blend of Southern cracker and city black girl.

‘Pretty stupid, huh?’

Meanwhile, Derek Strange meets Eve, who stopped street-walking when she got too old for her pimp, who goes by the remarkable name Worldwide. Their exchange produces a novel verb:

‘Sounds like you’re doin’ all right.’

‘I’m makin’ it.’

‘You just walked away from trickin’, huh?’

‘Worldwide specializes in these young girls. It wasn’t like I went off to another pimp. That’s something he wouldn’t let happen, understand what I’m sayin’? What it was, he couldn’t use me no more. I got old, Strange. So I clean-breaked and came on over here.’

Clean-breaked is presumably formed from the noun phrase clean break. The usual, roundabout way of expressing this as a verb is make a clean break – break clean is not used this way – but instead Eve economically turns clean break itself into a verb: clean-breaked. Note that she clean-breaks from the head’s usual ablaut form broke.

Strange teaches American football to a group of boys. At training one evening one boy, Joe Wilder, makes a skilful touchdown and jogs back with a spring in his step:

‘I be doin’ that on FedEx Field someday, Coach Derek.’

‘It’s I will be doing that,’ said Strange, who then smiled, thinking, I believe you will.

I be doin’ that is an example of habitual be, a feature of Black English (aka African American [Vernacular] English) that I discussed in reference to another Pelecanos book, King Suckerman. In correcting Joe’s dialect to standard English, Strange preserves the habitual aspect: he doesn’t say ‘It’s I will do that.’

Strange keeps up the community-mentor role at his girlfriend’s house, where he tries to lay down some ground rules for her teenage son, Lionel, who protests.

‘I wasn’t even thinkin’ about smokin’ that stuff tonight, you want the truth. This girl I’m seein’, she’s special to me, understand, and I wouldn’t do nothin’, anything, that I thought would get her in any kind of trouble with the law.’

What I like here is the way Lionel expresses negation. The switch of register from non-standard grammar (wouldn’t do nothin’) to standard (wouldn’t do anything), including reinstatement of the word-final g, underscores his resolve – his use of anything is meant not as self-correction but as emphasis.

That g crops up again later when Strange and Quinn are waiting to speak with a man in a department store who, though he is shining a customer’s shoes, also owns the business and several other outlets:

Strange and Quinn waited in an alcove-type area beside the stand. They could hear the white man talking to the shoe-shine man about the Redskins/Ravens game, praising only the black players. They could hear the white man ending his sentences with ‘man’ and they could hear him dropping his g’s, talking in a way that he thought would endear him to the black man kneeling at his feet. Talking in a way he would never talk at work and in a way he would forbid his children from talking at the dinner table at home. Strange looked over at Quinn, and Quinn looked away.

The customer in the store is perhaps overdoing what linguists call accommodation. David Crystal defines it as follows, in his Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics:

A theory in sociolinguistics which aims to explain why people modify their style of speaking to become more like or less like that of their addressee(s). For example, among the reasons why people converge towards the speech pattern of their listener are the desires to identify more closely with the listener, to win social approval, or simply to increase the communicative efficiency of the interaction.

Spelling features in a few other minor ways in Hell to Pay. When I first saw McDonald’s written as MacDonald’s, I wondered if it was a typo. But Pelecanos uses the variant deliberately. Carlton Little, a small-time criminal, ‘loved to eat anything you could take out of somebody’s hand from a drive-through window. Taco Bell, Popeyes, and the king of it all, MacDonald’s.’ (Italics in the original.)

The text in this part of the book is from Little and his tribe’s point of view, and the narration takes on the particular flavours and quirks of their speech. The addition of a vowel and italics for Mac indicate that they stress this syllable. A little later, the same spelling (with the same partial italicisation) recurs in a line from one of Little’s friends:

‘Yeah, well, you keep eatin’ that MacDonald’s, gonna make you worse than sick. Gonna kill you young.’

‘I be dyin’ young anyway.’

‘True.’

Little’s friend may be teasing him through imitation, or this could be how they all say it; probably the latter. The regular spelling McDonald’s occurs twice in running prose in the next paragraph.

Another word I noticed is Pelecanos’s use of y’all in the possessive case: ‘I thought I’d let the weekend pass, didn’t want to disturb your-all’s beauty sleeps.’ I’m not saying it’s rare, but I don’t see it very often. There’s also plenty of y’alls and an all a y’all.

Finally, aiight is used in dialogue throughout. This is a non-standard spelling of all right, which a few dictionaries (including Oxford and Collins) list under aight with one i. The duplicated i-form that Pelecanos uses, aiight, may indicate personal preference or a more gangster style than aight, or it may be an attempt to convey a long diphthong, lest anyone mispronounce it like eight.

My archive has more on language in crime fiction, including Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Walter Mosley, Richard Stark, Ed McBain, Gillian Flynn, Peter Temple, Joe Lansdale, Michael Connelly, and others. For all book posts, go here. For other stuff, try the tag cloud, category menu, or search box.

Whenever I had a query about slang (and I’ve had many), or felt like a random trawl through the underbelly of language (which was often), my first port of call, traditionally, was Chambers Dictionary of Slang by Jonathon Green. I have several slang dictionaries for various countries or lexical domains, but CDoS was the most generally useful. It has since been superseded: instead of CDoS I now turn to GDoS.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the culmination of a life’s work for Green. First published in print as a three-volume behemoth in 2010, to awards and rave reviews, it now emerges in digital form with about 30% ‘revised, augmented and generally improved’. I’ve been beta-testing the website and can report it is a beautiful thing, vast and wondrous, filthy and fabulous, endlessly diverting and eye-opening.

Today, thanks to sterling work by web developer David P. Kendal, sees the official launch of Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online.

GDoS in print was necessarily a snapshot, frozen at one point in time: a huge record of centuries of slang, but unable to keep up with the latest shifts and shimmies of linguistic creativity. Websites too must play catch-up, but they can do it better and much faster. GDoS Online builds on GDoS’s mass of research and adds a ton more, with regular updates scheduled and geographical scope to be continually extended.

If the lexicographer’s problem was once where to look, it is now in assessing at which point one dare stop looking. —Jonathon Green

Like any good monster, GDoS Online just keeps growing:

• 53,000 headwords are now 54,500
• 110,000 slang terms are now 132,000
• 410,000 citations – examples of usage – are now 650,000
• 10,000 entries have been antedated since 2010 (Green: ‘Words are always older than you think’)

Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online can be searched for definitions, first uses, etymologies, parts of speech, authors, titles, usage labels, etc. As the press release puts it: ‘Those who wish to know how many words James Joyce used for sexual intercourse or Charles Dickens for drunk will find their answers. And whether any came from Yiddish.’

Will these treasures be exsie (Aus.), laanie (S.Afr., 1975), higher than a cat’s back (US, 1882)? Negatory! (US military, 1955) There are two levels of access. The basics (headword, definition, etymology) are freely available to the public. The rest (citations, timeline, full search) are for subscribers: initially £49 ($60) a year for single users, £10 ($12.50) for students. Institutional subs are available on enquiry.

So go visit, bookmark, explore, and, if you can, subscribe to Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online.

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Related reading: Green has a brief introduction to GDoS Online on the site’s blog, and a post at Wordnik on the project’s fraught history. I’ve reviewed a couple of Green’s books, both terrific: one on his work as a slang lexicographer and one on the history of slang. You might also enjoy his ever-growing set of slang timelines.

[Note: GDoS is also available online from OUP, but this is the print contents only, and requires subscription even for definitions.]

Jargon and slang get a bad press. In the right contexts, though, they serve an important communicative purpose, at the same time allowing users to express their identity as part of a community – and to have fun with language while doing so.

Any specialised activity accumulates its own vocabulary, born of the particular actions, situations, equipment, and people involved. These lingos occasionally leak into other domains, or even the mainstream, but for the most part they remain more or less constrained or hidden, niche terminologies available only to the tribes in question.

In her new book Dent’s Modern Tribes: The Secret Languages of Britain, Susie Dent presents a host of these distinct lexicons for wider appreciation. As well as being a lifelong word lover, Dent is an unabashed eavesdropper, ear always poised for scraps of idiosyncratic interaction. That method, combined with straight-up interviews and chats, has yielded a wealth of material from a great variety of human professions and hobbies: cab drivers and cricketers, actors and anglers, soldiers and spies, roadies and ravers, firefighters and freemasons, teachers and (of course) trainspotters – dozens in all, each a rich source of verbal codes and curiosities.

These lexicons bundle history aplenty. For example, ever since Churchill, as UK home secretary, gave black-cab drivers the right to refuse a fare while eating, cabbies have referred to a meal as a Churchill. A slow period for taxis is called kipper season, ‘apparently from the days when cabbies could only afford to eat kippers’. Other terms are derived from more immediate sources: among cabin crew members a slam-clicker is, echoically, one who ‘goes straight to the hotel on landing and doesn’t emerge again until it’s time to leave’.

There is a grand medley of types of terms. This includes acronyms: a MAMIL is a middle-aged man in lycra (cycling); technical jargon: say your state is how to ask a pilot how much fuel their plane still has; back slang: dab tros is butchers’ back slang for a bad sort; and rhyming slang: a bunny is what some actors call a script, from (bunny) rabbit & pork = talk. There are also greetings and good lucks: Stay vertical, say bikers. Keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down, say truckers.

Many specialised phrases refer to other people: in-groups and out-groups relative to the tribe, and often tribes within the tribes. Birdwatchers – a dated term, apparently – may be birders, twitchers, togs, dudes, or greenies, according to their particular type of interest or level of experience. All are apt to grill  (watch closely) a crippler (rare and spectacular bird).

Much hospital lingo has become familiar though popular TV dramas like ER and Grey’s Anatomy, but Dent’s Modern Tribes has no shortage of additions. Many are darkly comical: bones and groans is the general ward, UBI is an unexplained beer injury, house red is blood (or a blood transfusion), stream team is the urology department, and ECU is the eternal care unit (i.e., heaven). Dent elaborates on the code of the emergency room:

Amid the bustle of triage and tantrums, the professionals exchange clipped phrases littered with abbreviations and cryptic jargon. Theirs is an utterly private shorthand used for clarity, brevity, and secrecy. It is also practical, creative, and frequently blue.

With the NHS now the fifth biggest employer worldwide, it’s unsurprising that medicine has

developed its own unique dialect, one that’s split into public and private. The private is characterized by black humour, irreverence, and euphemism. This is never more evident than in patients’ notes, which can include more observations than you bargained for.

Hospital also shows up in booksellers’ lingo, where a hospital copy is ‘a defective version of a canonical book held in stock only so that it can be cannibalized to improve another defective copy’. God’s copy, by contrast, is a particularly fine example of a book, while a dog or woofer is unsellable. Speaking of woofers (the speakers, that is), don’t ever refer directly to Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique among classical musicians. Because of various percussion disasters in its history, they prefer to call it The French Piece.

Each chapter has a set of related tribes, and with each tribe Dent explores its history or salient features. Every lexicon is steeped in its own lore and subculture, like the cryptic code of doctors, for whom discretion is essential, or the exclamations of darts enthusiasts that point to the boisterous atmosphere of a busy pub. Scattered throughout are passages on interesting etymologies. I was intrigued to learn, for instance, that we owe blaze a trail to the Vikings:

Trails used in hiking are often signposted with ‘blazes’ – a waymarking system that uses painted marks along the route. Blaze was a term borrowed from the Vikings after they raided British shores. Their word was blesi, a white star on a horse’s forehead, and the English version of it became ‘blaze’, a light-coloured mark or spot.

Early settlers in Massachusetts would ‘blaze roads through the woods, chipping the bark off the trees to indicate the path . . . . To blaze a trail was to be the first to take it, marking it out for others to follow’. And so ‘every word is a story in itself’, as Dent said in a recent interview; and as C4 Countdown’s resident lexicographer she has more such stories than most.

The only off-note for me, and it’s a small one, is that strong swear words are censored throughout – a strange decision, since the book is not aimed at children. As compensation, there are many phrases that sound rude but aren’t, like jizz, a waiter’s word for sauce or gravy, and funt, not an obscene blend but bankers’ slang for someone who is financially untouchable.

In the introduction Dent describes her book as in some ways

not just about words that are lost in translation, but about ones that are sometimes lost altogether. We have a knack of filtering out the strange sounds surrounding us every day, because we’re not part of the crowd they’re intended for. Besides, we’re too busy lobbing our own words over the same heads to get to the people who’ll understand us. . . . these drops from the eaves are not just worth savouring themselves, they also offer us a little piece of wisdom about the group who uses them.

The book finishes, appropriately, with a brief guide to eavesdropping.

Dent’s Modern Tribes is a work of considerable interest and charm, dishing up verbal pleasures and surprises on virtually every page. The passion of Dent’s chosen tribes for their respective niches is matched by that of the author for these hidden linguistic corners. The hefty research behind the book is worn lightly, and the results will appeal to word lovers and armchair anthropologists of every stripe. You can order it from Hodder and Stoughton (whose imprint John Murray sent me a copy for review), Amazon, or your preferred bookstore.

For more insights, anecdotes, and tribal words, you can hear Susie Dent speak eloquently about the book and tribal lingo here:

Technology is a constant source of new vocabulary – not just new words but new ways of using existing words. One I’ve noticed this year is ratio as a verb in internet slang, which I’ve bundled here with the more familiar take as a noun.

Ratio entered English in the 16thC as a noun borrowed from Latin, gaining its familiar modern sense decades later in a translation of Euclid. About a century ago – the OED’s first citation is from 1928 – ratio began life as a verb meaning ‘express as a ratio’ or similar. Here’s an example from Harold Smith’s book Aerial Photographs (1943):

Each print which departs from the average scale or shows any apparent tilt is rectified and ‘ratioed’, or corrected for scale, by means of a projection printer.

And now a new sense of ratio as a verb is emerging on Twitter. (If you’ve seen it elsewhere, let me know.)

A tweet can attract different kinds of response. You can reply to it, which means leaving a comment on it; retweet (RT) it, sharing it with your own followers; or ‘like’ it, equivalent to Facebook likes and formerly called favourites.* You can also ‘quote retweet’ it, but we’ll ignore that here.

Many tweets get little engagement, fading fast into obscurity. Others, especially from people or organisations with a large following, see a lot of activity – they may be replied to hundreds of times and RTed and liked thousands of times. And then there are tweets that attract a lot of replies but relatively few RTs and likes.

This is the ratio: replies versus RTs and likes. If the replies are critical, you’re getting ratioed. It’s commonly used in passive constructions: a tweet or tweeter is ratioed or gets ratioed.

Let’s look at an example, selected because it’s the most recent major one I saw on Twitter. It’s from the @marieclaire account, which has 2.3 million followers. Of its last 100 or so tweets, most get 0–10 RTs and 0–30 likes; a few outliers exceed those figures.

And then there’s this tweet:

At the time of writing, the tweet had 221 retweets, 498 likes, but 5.7 thousand replies, generally critical. Some of the replies – telling Marie Claire that Swift owes them nothing, or that her politics are her own business unless she decides otherwise – are RTed far more than the original. A later @marieclaire tweet sharing the same link got ratioed on a smaller scale: 10 retweets, 42 likes, 198 replies and counting.

In another instance, about a week ago, a controversial tweet about Danica Roem by a religious speaker was heavily ratioed (528 RTs, 1.6k likes, 10k replies); a flavour of the reaction noting this can be found by searching Twitter for the tweeter’s name + ratio and derivatives.

Here are a few more examples of the new usage. You can see the ratios below the tweets being referred to:

Spelling-wise I favour ratioed, but the frequency of ratio’d suggests antipathy to or uncertainty about the first inflection’s vowel string, reflected too in the relative frequency of grocer’s apostrophes in plurals ending in vowels (tomato’s, potato’s). Ratioing lacks an alternative and doesn’t seem problematic.

BuzzFeed, unusual among news sources, has used the word in a headline. But its readers are more likely to be familiar with internet memes and lingo. It opted for ratio’d over ratioed:

Sometimes the verb is intensified, for example ratio’d/ratioed into oblivion, another dimension, the stratosphere, orbit, the ether, the sun, the asteroid belt, next Wednesday, the Earth’s core, the abyss, hell, the ground, dust, a foxhole, a corncob, and so on. Themes recur, as you can see.

This last one, pleasingly, also verbs actually.

The popularity of Twitter as a platform for public discussion means controversies can spread quickly – and so can terminology that describes how they play out. Ratio as a verb is currently used a few dozen times a day on Twitter, judging by this basic search, but it may grow. Visit that link for a fuller flavour of the usage.

A couple of exceptions are worth noting. A reply-heavy ratio on a tweet doesn’t mean you’re getting ratioed. If you ask Twitter what book to read, or where to eat in London, you’ll get far more replies than RTs or likes, but that’s no indication of the quality of the tweet. Nor does getting ratioed-ratioed always mean your take is bad – I’ve seen tweets ratioed because they were misunderstood or taken out of context.

Take as a verb has many senses and subsenses; as a noun it has far fewer. One modern sense, yet to appear in many dictionaries, has take meaning a reaction to, opinion on, or interpretation of something, often a topical story. As in, ‘What’s your take on this?’ The OED dates the usage to 1977.

The derived phrase hot take often has negative connotations, or is used ironically to frame a banal observation on something trivial. So you best hope your hot take doesn’t get ratioed. What the lower limit of that ratio is, mathematically, no one can say for sure. But as internet slang it’s a productive, efficient bit of lexical engineering.

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* A like doesn’t imply approval – it may just serve as a bookmark or some other function. Nor does a retweet, though it’s more likely to.