Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 22, 1994 TAG: 9408120024
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
By which he means good.
But you knew that.
``I never expected that it would receive so much attention,'' a slightly flummoxed J.L. Lighter told reporters Thursday.
He spoke at a brown-bag lunch at the National Endowment for the Humanities, which gave Lighter almost $400,000 in grants to complete Volume I of the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang ($50).
Lighter delivered a tongue-in-cheek talk aimed at proving slang's existence based on the use of the word ``keen'' in a furniture ad from the October 1993 issue of the magazine Southern Living.
Lighter, 45, who teaches linguistics, English and American studies at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, began collecting slang 25 years ago as a hobby. Halfway through college, at New York University, ``I had close to 10,000 citations - in shoe boxes, in orange crates and so forth,'' he said.
Volume II of the dictionary, covering H-R, is due out in spring 1996; Volume III, S-Z, will be published in 1997.
Volume I covers entries from ``A'' - a euphemism for ``ass,'' to ``grytch,'' to steal.
In between is every dirty word, every insult, every curse, every politically incorrect term from A-G that you've ever heard of - and many you certainly haven't.
Some of the words cited have come to us through the miracle of television - such as ``bippy,'' popularized on ``Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In,'' and ``babelicious,'' from the Wayne's World skits on ``Saturday Night Live.''
Others have come from wars: ``frag,'' as in to kill a superior officer, from Vietnam, and ``foxhole,'' from World War I.
Lighter's opus disproves the commonly held belief that slang is transitory; terms such as ``out of sight'' and ``sweat it out'' date back to the 1800s. Use of the word ``bad'' to mean good isn't new, either, Lighter tells us; he found such references as early as 1877.
One of the longest entries is for a four-letter vulgarity for sexual intercourse which can't be printed here. Its variations fill 12 pages, testifying to Americans' endless inventiveness.
by CNB