The truth is, though, that I probably don’t understand Lighter and I’m probably not doing justice to the complex algorithms that allow him to discriminate between slang and other kinds of verbal festivity. Why is butt plug out and French tickler in? If a lack of standard English synonyms is one of the tests for exclusion, why is an admittedly fine term like gig-line (meaning “a straight alignment of the buttons of a shirt and jacket, the belt buckle, and the fly of the trousers”) included? Is there really a standard English equivalent for such a disposition of one’s wardrobe? And why is bong, in the sense of a water-filtered pot-smoking mechanism, not to be found, while the related but more recent bong meaning a “device consisting of a funnel attached to a tube for drinking beer quickly” is? Lighter includes fluff (“the usu. passive partner in a lesbian relationship”) and sister words femme and fuckee, and even bender (“a male homosexual who habitually assumes the passive role in anal copulation”—also known as an ankle grabber), but not the related S/M sense of bottom. Fender-bender, in the automotive sense, is in, as is cluster-fuck, fuckhead, and even fenderhead, but gender-bender and genderfuck are out — hardly surprising or scandalous omissions, although both are interesting meldings, part of the steady slanging down of the High Church word gender, which only a few years ago was esteemed by language reformers for its lack of connotative raciness, and which is now quietly de-euphemizing, thanks to the work of gender-fuck pioneers like Kate (née Albert) Bornstein, lesbian trans-sexual author of a play called Hidden: A Gender. In the area of lit-crit and genre studies, fuck-book is here (along with dick-book and cunt book), but friction-fiction is possibly too recent or too technical.
Lighter is at his most severely exclusive regarding authorial or journalistic neologisms. For instance, his entries for bush, crank, and fudge-packer quote lines from a book of my own, being pre-existent words, whereas none of the A-through-G novelties in that same book (bobolinks, candy-corn, clit-cloister, cream horns, frans, etc.) — novelties, may I say, on which I expensed some spirit and wasted some shame — were allowed in. Coinages, Lighter explains, “owe their birth partly to high spirits but chiefly to the coiner’s forgivable desire to impress the public with his or her wit.” He censures earlier works of reference such as Berrey and Van den Bark’s The American Thesaurus of Slang (1942) for including such “ephemera,” contending that
slang differs … from idiosyncratic wordplay and other nonce figuration in that it maintains a currency independent of its creator, the individual writer or speaker.
Lighter’s experience tells him that
Most words and phrases claimed as “slang” are nonce terms or “oncers,” never to be seen or heard of again. Some become true “ghost words,” recorded in slang dictionaries for many years but never encountered in actual usage. We have attempted to exclude such expressions from this dictionary.
(“Ghost words” must never be confused with ghost turds—“accumulations of lint found under furniture. — usu. considered vulgar.”) Occasionally a fetching journalistic invention will prosper — notably the creative work of writers at Variety in the twenties and thirties, who brought us such necessities as turkey, lay an egg, and flop. But Lighter plays down the importance of print in slang’s genesis and dissemination: “although journalism has often encouraged the spread of slang, the chief method of popularization has always been the shifting associational networks among individuals”—particularly, he convincingly asserts, the associational networks within the U.S. armed services. (Lighter’s command of the history of military slang is stunning: the entry for gook has over fifty citations; it is three times longer than the entry for chick.) Real slang just happens: “lexical innovations are traceable only rarely to specific persons; the proportion of slang actually created by identifiable individuals is minute.”
Despite slang’s usually anonymous and often paramilitary origins, hundreds of identifiable individuals have a place in the Dictionary, doing their bit to substantiate the existence of a given piece of loose language. Perhaps the most cheering thing about this awesome project is how seriously it takes the trade paperback. As one would expect, there are crumbs collected from movies, newspapers, TV series, linguistic research interviews, and celebrity profiles — as when Steve McQueen is quoted as saying, “I chickenshitted on the second turn”—but there are also innumerable illustrative quotations drawn from the work of novelists and litterateurs and even poets. Lighter and his colleagues really read books. It is a delight to encounter so many writers through their passing use of some regionalism, obscenity, or malediction. In this snickerer’s OED, William Faulkner appears not for some high-flown word like endure, but for ass-scratcher. Sandburg is immortalized as a user of arky malarky. I also ran into (in alphabetical order by term) Thomas Berger (ass-wipe, dinkum), Cheever (asshole used adjectivally), Sorrentino (banana nose), Eudora Welty (bohunkus), John Sayles (boot in the sense of vomit, dead presidents), Woody Allen (bowels in an uproar), Camille Paglia (breeders), Joseph Mitchell (bums), A. J. Liebling (pain in the butt), Philip Roth (circle-jerker), Harlan Ellison (clock and grease-burger), Northrop Frye (clueless), Barry Hannah (cockhead, dicking off), Henry Miller (crap), Kerouac (crockashit), and Erica Jong (crotch rot).
And there is Joseph Wambaugh (cumbucket, don’t know my dick from a dumplin), Saul Bellow (candy kid, cunt-struck), Bernard Malamud (dead-to-the-neck), Maya Angelou (dickteaser), William Burroughs (doodle, glory hole), Danielle Steele (dumb cunt), Stephen King (el birdo, cock-knocker), Bellow (fart-blossom), Hunter Thompson (big spit), Coover (flagpole meaning penis), Grace Metalious (frig you), John O’Hara (frig), S. J. Perelman (frigged), Edmund Wilson (friggin’), H. L. Mencken (frigging, crap), Dos Passos (frigging, gash), Larry Heinemann (fuck the duck, crapola), Mailer (fuck yourself, cream), Tom Wolfe (go-to-hell as an adj.), Donald Barthelme (grog), and Robert Heinlein (grok, of course, but also go cart for “car”).