The Lexicographer's Rules

Recent interesting catchwords from the Double-Tongued Dictionary are:

oopsie baby n. a baby resulting from an unplanned conception.

taco meat hair n. the tight, dark curly hair of a black person. Often used self-referentially and between black people themselves.

I’ve got a new column in the Malaysian Star today, this one about clipped endings of words like -tard, -tastic, and -tacular, and about retard and retarded.

Recent interesting catchwords from the Double-Tongued Dictionary are:

underpowered adj. in research or information-gathering, having insufficient data.

hood tax n. a mugging or the things taken in a mugging.

Recent interesting catchwords from the Double-Tongued Dictionary are:

granny farming: n. a form of voting fraud in which pre-marked absentee ballots are taken to nursing homes to be used and mailed by residents.

passablanc adj. in New Orleans, being of mixed race but presenting oneself as a white person.

If you want to see what proper research into the roots of American English looks like, I highly recommend Michael Montgomery’s From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English. Michael is also co-editor of the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English and the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 5: Language. You can get a taste of his scholarship at his web site about Southern Appalachian English.