Green’s Dictionary of Slang - Five hundred years of the vulgar tongue
greensdictofslang.comEconomist 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.
https://archive.is/GWLTQ (now with complimentary membership in a botnet)
I always love seeing what people dedicate their time to when money is no longer a factor. May we all be so lucky.
I can also recommend Roger's Profanisaurus for a British view of swearwords and vulgar euphemisms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger%27s_Profanisaurus
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.
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.
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!
There is an English dictionary of fuck called The F Word
Translating this page to English is quite funny
Interestingly there are some not so good sources
>F
>[SE fail, also used as a mark for inadequate work, or fuck!]
>(juv.) response to someone else’s bad news.
F doesn't come from fail but from Call of Duty
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.
Culture as language, culture as dress. Burberry was a ww1 trench coat, the hunting shooting fishing set and then descended to be ambitious working class Essex Chav. Same with slang, polari was gay slang, BBC radio artful in-joke, normalised, now obscure.
Old is new is old. Kids hate nothing more than grandma throwing gang signs they learned from their elders not knowing the elder in question learned it from grandma first.
People probably get phd in the second order differential of slang rate of change.