The Lexicographer's Rules

Rick Harrison stretches his lexical muscles with a rumination on big words, and quotes me to boot: “Most words are new to most people most of the time.” And don’t you forget it.

One of the words I encountered today that I’ve never seen before: ridgeling, an animal, especially a horse, with one or both testicles undescended.

Torie Bosch explains it in Slate’s Explainer:

We’re all guilty of changing the way we speak in subtle ways, depending on whom we’re talking to. Linguists call this “code shifting"—you don’t want to talk to your boss the same way you talk to your old college roommates. We often code shift subconsciously, by picking up other people’s speech patterns (as anyone who has ever studied abroad probably knows).

We just finished upgrading the server, so if you encountered any difficulties over the last half-hour, that would be why. The new setup should be better able to handle the increased user load.

Bryan Curtis reviews for Slate Randy Kearse's Street Talk, a slang dictionary he wrote in prison. My colleague Jesse Sheidlower is quoted as giving the book generally good marks, commenting that it's a bit better than folk dictionaries usually are:

"One of the typical things about self-edited books of this sort is that they'll include everything that is not standard English—slang terms, unusual pronunciations, a colloquial phrase that's not slang. But these"—he gestured at Street Talk—"are mostly real lexical phrases. The terms in here have a particular meaning, and they're used that way."