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There’s a chain of restaurants in the United States called White Castle that sells greasy, yummy, little, oniony hamburgers in paper boxes.

On those boxes is printed the slogan Buy ‘em by the “sack.” The double quote marks around “sack” are theirs, not mine. They are what is called “scare quotes.”

Scare quotes are usually found around very short phrases or around single words in order to call attention to those words in a negative way. They aren’t used to quote someone, they’re used to call into question whatever words are found within them. They instil doubt.

For example, in the movie Citizen Kane, scare quotes appear on the screen in a screaming newspaper headline, Candidate Kane Caught in Love Nest with “Singer.” Singer is in scare quotes as a way of suggesting that Kane’s sweetie, Susan Alexander, was little more than a floozy (a woman of loose morals) and not much of a singer.

White Castle, it turns out, has been using quotes around “sack” since at least the ’50s and probably longer. Because of the way the company uses them, I prefer to call them something other than scare quotes.

For one thing, they’re not really calling the word “sack” into question. There’s no scaring to be done, no fear to be instilled, no doubt to be sown. I suppose there are cheap laughs to be had by reading Buy ‘em by the “sack” as if the “sack” were only pretending to be a sack but is instead something else, like a tugboat or a banana. That’s the kind of intentional misunderstanding you have to make in order to think that those quotes around “sack” shouldn’t be there.

They belong there because the company is calling attention to the word. “Sack”, perhaps, wasn’t a word that everyone would use. Some might prefer “bag”, since “sack” historically has been much less used in some parts of the United States to refer to the folded paper container your purchases are packed into at the grocery store.

So if they’re not scare quotes around “sack”, what are they?

I suggest the term shout quotes. And I suggest that the use of quotations for emphasis be condoned for casual use by all language authorities: hired, self-appointed, or otherwise.

There’s a weblog called the “Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks” and on the photo-sharing website Flickr, there’s a fantastic picture pool called “quote abuse.” Both mock the use of quotes used to emphasise or draw attention to a word.

But as examples on both sites show, there are proper, natural, widely understood rules behind using shout quotes, even if they’re taught in no grammar or style book that I can find.

They’re appropriate when you have no other easy way to indicate emphasis. They’re appropriate when used, for example, in casual sign-making. They’re appropriate when bolding or underlining is not possible. They’re appropriate when used by people who don’t do typesetting for a living.

One picture shows a handwritten sign that says, “Sorry”, but there will be no pumpkin soup served today!

Well, for lame laughs, we could assume those are scare quotes and that the writer meant they weren’t really sorry. But that’s an uncharitable reading. The only way you could truthfully assume that the sorry was insincere would be to also assume that the sign-writer was incapable of even the simplest lie about being sorry. Clearly, with the shout quotes, the sign-writer meant that “sorry” was to be emphasised. Perhaps the pumpkin soup is extraordinary and they really were sorry it was not being served.

The intentional misreading of the shout quotes as scare quotes does grow rather thin. The sign that says We Love “Sushi” makes one commenter on Flickr wonder whether the sign-maker meant “cat” in place of “sushi.” See, if “sushi” is in quotes it must mean that the word is dubious, right? Maybe they’re selling cat-meat instead of fish?

No! They just wanted to emphasise the word “sushi.” Very simple. You have to go out of your way to get it wrong.

A truck door that says our drivers are “safe” drivers could make you wonder whether that company does indeed define “safe” differently from everyone else—besides leaving you wondering who they are trying to convince, when safe-driving behaviour alone should do the trick.

But of course, all they meant to do was to emphasise the word “safe”, in much the same way that in sign after sign, “do not” or “please” are put inside shout quotes that emphasise the strongest sentiments of their authors.

I endorse the use of quotation marks for emphasis, even in extreme cases. One example I collected is of a sign in a bar advertising half-off bottles of beer during happy hours. There are four shout quotes, one in each corner, decorating the page as much as they are enclosing the text, but all of them emphasising the discount.

That perfect example of using quotes for emphasis is something I can drink to.

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A popular question from English language-learners and native speakers alike is, “What dictionary should I use or buy?”

There are many bad dictionaries. It’s difficult to tell what’s worth your money and time and what isn’t. So, let me offer you some ways that you can help distinguish the good dictionaries from the bad ones.

Use or buy two dictionaries.

The editorial guidelines of dictionaries can vary greatly. They control what words are included, how thorough the definitions are, what kind of special features are added, and for what reading level the text is written.

Just as two parents contribute something to the creation of every child, each dictionary will contribute different things to your understanding of English words.

Make sure they’re from two different publishers.

It’s not uncommon for publishers to repackage the same dictionary material into many different forms.

To be sure you are getting two truly different viewpoints on a word and its meaning, you need to use dictionaries that have different content. The best way to ensure that is to make sure they’re published by different companies.

Use a learner’s dictionary and a general-use dictionary.

Even further, you might do best to use one dictionary that is for learners and another that is intended for general use at home or the workplace. They have different goals and different content.

The learners’ dictionaries tend to have simpler definitions, more information about collocations (words that tend to appear together), more extra material like synonyms and antonyms, and fewer overall words.

General-use dictionaries tend to define more words, to include more etymological information, to include more encyclopaedic information (such as biographies of famous people), and they tend to be physically larger.

Make sure the book was recently published.

You need a dictionary that is current. Make sure it was published in the last five years.

Look for recent words.

Publishers will often republish dictionaries over decades without updating the material with new entries, or at the most with only the barest few new entries.

In the United States, it’s common to find cheap dictionaries for just a few dollars that claim to contain tens of thousand of words. They’re perfectly good dictionaries—except they don’t include words like Internet or computer or anything else that’s modern. They’re simply reselling old material.

Make sure the dictionaries you choose have other modern words that wouldn’t have been used more than two decades ago like weblog, blogosphere, hybrid car, text messaging, SMS, LOL, and other technical or recent words. Finding these will help ensure that the dictionary has been updated relatively recently.

Look for dirty words.

All parts of English are important, even those trouble-making words that are coarse, derogatory, or sexual. A good lexicographer will include the most common words of all kinds, including ones that can be troublesome.

If a dictionary’s editors have chosen to leave out words they consider offensive, we must also wonder what other words they have left out. What are their criteria for judging words to be offensive? Are they leaving out words that concern any religion but their own? Are they leaving out words that deal with political viewpoints they don’t support? Are they leaving out words simply because they think they’re ugly? Are they including words simply because they like them? Are they deleting insulting words for their own ethnic group and leaving in insulting words for other groups?

This may surprise you, but I usually recommend that parents give adult dictionaries to their children. It is important for children to get frank, matter-of-fact meanings for words rather than getting the wrong idea from other children, yet many children’s dictionaries don’t include these troublesome words.

Naughty words lose a lot of their power when they are explained in dry, ordinary dictionary definitions instead of accompanied by the giggle and wink of the playground. Children are also usually relieved that the words really are more boring and ordinary than they first sound.

Of course, by not listing the words here, I am assuming that you are an adult who already knows them. If you are a child, I encourage you to seek out a parent or other adult you respect. Ask them to explain these words in plain language, or better, ask them to show you a good dictionary in which you can look up the words for yourself.

Make sure there are sample sentences.

Lots of them. It is easier to learn the meaning of a word from sample sentences than it is from definitions. This is why learners’ dictionaries—those designed for students who are learning English—have so many of them.

Don’t be persuaded by superficial features.

Etymologies, for example, are interesting, but they are largely irrelevant when it comes to using a dictionary for schoolwork (unless you are specifically writing about word origins) or for preparing business reports.

Coloured text, too, is often not worth the extra money and colour photographs are a luxury unless the dictionary is primarily a picture dictionary.

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Rituals and superstitions and the words that go with them are a favourite topic on the radio show I co-host. Our listeners can’t get enough and the e-mail keeps coming in long after we discuss them on the air.

For example, if two children are talking and they accidentally say the same thing at the same time, then the first to say “jinx!” scores a point over the other person. The jinx-shouter has the right to demand a punishment of the other person, especially their silence. That person is not permitted to say anything until they are unjinxed.

The rituals for getting unjinxed – being permitted to speak again—are complicated and can vary even within a single school. They usually involve the recitation of a lot of nonsense words like “jinkle pink pickle jinx, I love you.”

This exposes the jinxed to further embarrassment because “I love you” must be said to another child—usually someone agreed to be loathsome. To get unjinxed, you have to suffer a little.

In parts of the United States, they say “Jinx! You owe me a coke!” when two people speak as one. Coke is a short name for the Coca-Cola brand soda, though in parts of the American south it means any brand of soda pop or fizzy drink. The penalty here is, of course, having to buy the other person a soda.

Another thing that can be done when two children accidentally say the same thing at once, especially between close friends, is pinky-swearing. They each hook the little finger of one hand to the other person’s pinky, they recite some rhyme known to them both, and they perform other gestures, such as clapping or complicated handshakes.

The rituals surrounding jinx are a form of childhood superstition. It is, for some reason, bad luck to say something at the same time as someone else. So the charms and chants are a way of deflecting that bad luck.

Another superstitious practice is bread and butter.

If you’re walking down the street with a friend and you encounter an obstruction—a telephone pole, a mailbox, an open manhole—and each of you walks around a different side of the obstruction, then one of you says “bread and butter” and other says “come to supper.”

In another version, the first person says “peanut butter” and the second says “jelly.” There are many more versions, each with the idea that the vague threat of bad luck is avoided by saying something.

This isn’t so much a superstition as it is a ritual or road game: padiddle, variously called bediddle, padoodle, padungle, perdiddle and perdiddo. In this game, when you’re riding in a car and you see another car with only one working headlight, you shout “perdiddle!” If you shout it first, you get the right to punch another passenger on the arm. Not very sporting, really, but those are the games of children (and some adults).

An older version of padiddle was a kissing game. If a couple (meaning a man and a woman who are romantically involved) are out for spin (for a drive in the car) and the man is the first to spy a car with one working headlight, then he shouts “padiddle!” which gives him the right to kiss his gal. If the woman spies the car first, then she shouts it out and gets to slap her guy. Seems like an even trade.

There’s also a variation of the padiddle that involves the tail-lights of a car, rather than the headlights, and it has many variations, too: padunkle, padonkle, perdunkle, pasquaddle, paduchi, Popeye and dinklepink.

The many rules for jinx and the many variant names for padiddle are a good indication that these customs are passed by word of mouth or by observation and not through education or from reading books.

Strange things can happen to words that are passed mainly in spoken form. For example, the variants “perdiddle” and “perdiddo” result from what is called R intrusion, in which a speaker adds an R sound even though there is no letter R in the word. Thus, padiddle becomes perdiddle.

R-intrusion is common in some dialects of American English. You can, for example, often hear it in the word “wash” which is made to sound like warsh. Washington, too, sometimes sounds like Warshington.

Given that these intrusive Rs are consistent and follow set patterns, we know that they are a feature of dialect—kind of a minority sub-language—and not simply a lot of people making the same mistake.

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There are, technically speaking, two Internets. One—Internet2—is used privately by universities, scientists, corporations, and the US government agencies.

The other, which we might call the plain vanilla Internet (meaning the most basic kind), is the one nearly everyone else in the world uses. It’s what most of us mean when we say “the Internet.”

However, a lot of people are now calling the regular Internet the Internets, plural, with an ‘s’ at the end. It takes only a little research to see that they are mimicking President George W. Bush who is on record as misspeaking this way. He said “Internets” instead of “Internet” in 2000 and again in 2004.

As a result, “Internets” is now a heavily entrenched word, a plural used where a singular is usual.

But why do some people say it that way?

For one thing, it pokes fun at the president, who is known for his disfluency (his inability to speak well).

It’s also meant to be slightly ironic and a bit self-deprecating. You can make fun of yourself by saying it that way.

People incorrectly say words on purpose all the time. My wife says aminal instead of “animal” and maters instead of “tomatoes.”

I sometimes say “muscles” so that the ‘c’ has a ‘k’ sound (the same way the cartoon character Popeye says it), computor instead of “computer” (after Ned Beatty’s exaggerated pronunciation of “Mr Luthor” in the Superman movies), and I occasionally say benimber instead of “remember” because it was something my cousin Paul said more than 20 years ago.

My wife and I both sometimes say chimbly instead of “chimney,” fambly instead of “family,” and liberry instead of “library.” Like maters, these are common enough pronunciations that many Americans wouldn’t notice we were saying them any differently from anyone else.

It’s not that my wife and I, or anyone who says Internets, are maroons (a humorous way of intentionally misrendering “moron”).

My wife is a linguist, after all, and I am a lexicographer (that is, a dictionary compiler and editor), and we both know how to speak in very correct formal English or even just up-to-snuff (meaning acceptable and passable) day-to-day English. We both know how to pronounce “library”; it just amuses us, sometimes, to say it another way.

People speak that way because saying a word wrong on purpose is a form of wordplay. It adds variety, colour, and whimsy to our speech. It’s a common characteristic of slang, which is partly built upon fooling around.

Perzackly and prezactly, for example, are wildly ridiculous pronunciations of the adverb “exactly.” The Oxford English Dictionary rightly marks them as being largely American and further indicates that they are representations of rural or southern speech.

That’s dictionary-writer’s talk, which means people spell the word to imitate the stereotypes of uneducated or unsophisticated folks. They’re trying to be funny or to make fun of someone, but you’ll find that they’re often purposely making fun of themselves, too.

A more common intentional misspeaking is beeswax which is used in the expression “mind your own beeswax!” which means “mind your own business!” It’s what you say when someone is trying to find out your secrets.

In this case, “beeswax,” which is a real word meaning the stuff with which bees make their honeycombs, is a malapropism. A malapropism is when you substitute a word with a similar-sounding one, although it’s usually accidental.

Many Americans also say coinkydink instead of coincidence. It’s sometimes spelled kwinkydink or kawinkydink and is almost always used in a light-hearted or goofy way. It refers to when two or more things happen in the same way, at the same time, at the same place, or to the same people in a way that is surprising. Although you know they’re not related, they seem to be. Coinkydinks are interesting but unimportant.

There are still more: one fell swoop, an idiom that means “an action that happens fast and all at once,” is often rendered as in one swell foop. That’s a spoonerism, where the first sounds of several words are swapped around to create a nonsensical expression.

Mercy buckets is a rendering of the French merci beaucoup, meaning “thank you very much.” People who say this usually know perfectly well that the French is not pronounced that way. They’re just practising a fake and exaggerated ignorance.

Ossifer is a created by metathesis from “officer,” meaning a police officer. Metathesis is when letters inside a word are swapped around, in this case in the way that a drunk person might do.

This word often accompanies long joke sayings in which many of the words are jumbled, such as, “Ossifer, I swear to drunk I’m not God”—the kind of thing you might say to a cop if you were likkered up (inebriated) and couldn’t speak normally.

Anyhoo (anyhow), there are many more of these, but I’ll save them for another time.

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The current political turmoil in Pakistan has turned up a curious bit of slang: Busharraf. It blends the names of Presidents Pervez Musharraf and George W. Bush. It shows that Musharraf is seen by his opponents to be a puppet for American political interests.

Nicknames like that are powerful. They describe who we have become, while given names reflect, perhaps, only what our parents wished us to be.

The current fad is blended nicknames, which mix two words together to make one. They work well because they are easy to understand. If you know the words they are made from, then you have a good chance at guessing their meanings.

For example, former US President Bill Clinton and his wife Senator Hillary Clinton, who is now campaigning for the presidency, are sometimes known as Billary or Hillbill.

Billary is a blend of their first names, Bill and Hillary. Hillbill is a blend of the same two names in a different order and with an added twist: add a y and it becomes hillbilly, which is a word used to describe backward and uncouth people from the Clintons’ home state of Arkansas.

Both Clinton nicknames reflect another fad of mixing the names of two people who are a power couple, especially two people who are rich, famous, and able to make things happen. The classic example (now several years and several relationships out of date) is Bennifer, which was used to describe the relationship of actor Ben Affleck and singer Jennifer Lopez.

Hillary Clinton, who is sometimes called unfeminine and overly businesslike, is occasionally called Chillary – a blend of chill and Hillary – by those who think she does not have a warm personality. Of course, if she were anything else, her critics would probably complain she was touchy-feely, which would be a criticism that she was soft and unable to withstand the rigours of the presidency.

Many cities and places take nicknames. My favourite is Sacratomato, which blends the name of the capital of California, Sacramento, with tomato, a plant which is grown near there in abundance.

Also in that state, sometimes known as Califunny (“funny” meaning weird or odd) and the land of fruit and nuts (fruit and nut being names for people who are weird or odd) is Eastlos or Easlos, a shortened form of East Los Angeles, long used by Spanish-speakers.

The movie business of Hollywood, California, has generated a slew of nicknames for other places. Bollywood everyone knows (the film industry of India, right?), but what about Nollywood, Wellywood, and Kollywood, referring to the film industries of Nigeria; Wellington, New Zealand; and Tamil-speakers?

One state away is Las Vegas (which in Spanish means “the fertile fields”), Nevada, that glitzy mecca of gambling and entertainment, known as Lost Wages for the many paycheques that have disappeared into its slot machines and roulette tables.

The city is also used to form other nicknames: Nash Vegas, for example, refers to Nashville, Tennessee, and Spoke Vegas refers to Spokane, Washington. The first because it has a lot of neon and cheesy (cheap and inauthentic) entertainment, like Las Vegas does; the latter for having casinos, also like Las Vegas does.

The -wood in Hollywood and the Vegas in Las Vegas are known as combining forms, meaning they can be used to make other words but don’t really have any meaning on their own.

Other nicknames use affixes: prefixes and suffixes, which go on the beginnings and ends of words.

London is sometimes called Londongrad by the new generation of rich Russians who have moved there. It uses the Russian -grad suffix, which means “town” in city names like Petrograd and Leningrad, two old names for St Petersburg.

Just outside of London, Heathrow Airport has long been called Thiefrow because of thefts of belongings from suitcases.

Dearborn, Michigan, where many Muslims and Middle Easterners have settled, is derogatorily called Dearbornistan. This uses the -stan suffix which means “place” or “land” and is found in place names like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In fact, all the countries ending in that suffix, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, are together nicknamed as the Stans.

Another nickname that uses that suffix is Trashcanistan, an unkind word which can refer to any poor Middle Eastern country or Central Asian republic.

But back to the blends. Nairobi, Kenya, is sometimes called Nairobbery, in reference to its high crime rate, while Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is called Killadelphia in reference to its murder rate.

That’s all from the Big Apple, Gotham, the Place So Nice They Named it Twice, New York, New York.

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Over the past few weeks in this space, I’ve shared old slang with you, but now it’s time to look at more recent slang, slang so new it has yet to prove that it will endure. 

From The Independent in London comes a bit of military slang that’s a head-scratcher (a puzzle) at first.  

In December, Jerome Starkey wrote, “Heat-seeking Javelin rockets designed to hit T72 tanks tearing across Europe are very good at finding insurgents cowering in compounds. Marines call it ‘throwing a Porsche at them’, because the missiles cost 65,000 a pop.” 

The expression throw a Porsche at someone has one of the hallmarks of slang: a bit of humour. Of course, the British soldiers are not actually tossing an expensive sports car at the enemy. They are, however, firing missiles that cost just about as much as a high-end sports car such as a Porsche. The slang comes about via metaphor. 

By the way, to say something costs a certain amount of money a pop, means it costs that much for every single one that you buy. You could also say, “Every time I ride the bus, it costs me two dollars a pop.” 

Another metaphor was used to invent the expression Q-tip cruise. This one takes a bit of unpacking (that is, explaining) in order to make it comprehensible.  

Q-tip is a brand name of a type of short stick that has very small tufts of white cotton on the end. They’re sold mainly in North America and are used for putting on make-up, daubing wounds with antiseptic, or cleaning out your ears (although the official advice is not to use them that way because you could do damage to your ear drums). 

The Q is capitalised because “Q-tip” is a proper noun, although it is close to becoming generic in the United States, the same way that the brand name Kleenex is now widely used to mean any tissue paper on which you can blow your nose. The existing generic name of the Q-tip product is “cotton swab.”  

Cruise in Q-tip cruise refers to a pleasure trip aboard a large ship.  

Now, the metaphor comes into play because many of the passengers on Q-tip cruises are senior citizens or just seniors. That is, old people who have white hair that resembles the cotton on the ends of Q-tips. 

Here’s another bit of new slang: to swede. Sweding is a particularly interesting word from a new movie called Be Kind, Rewind. Created by French filmmaker Michael Gondry, the plot revolves around two men who work at a video rental store in which all of the videotapes of movies are accidentally erased.  

So the two men decide to swede the movies themselves, meaning to re-make all of the movies with a home video camera and the barest of props and plots. In use outside of the movie, Gondry and the website for Be Kind, Rewind say that to swede a movie is to insert yourself into it, to make yourself a part of the action. 

Another bit of new slang is to jock. It means to steal, or, in other slang, to bite. Bite and jock are especially used this way on the Internet, where they might be used in sentences like, “Don’t jock my pages!” or “He didn’t write that! He bit it from me.” 

In politics, a slang term that has caught my attention is hispandering. It, too, requires some unpacking before it’s easy to understand.  

First, it’s a blend of the words Hispanic and pandering. Hispanic is an adjective that refers to people from Latin America. In this case, because hispandering is a political term, it more specifically refers to illegal Spanish-speaking immigrants. 

Pandering isn’t slang, but instead is a long-standing English word meaning to give in to the wishes or desires of someone else, especially when those wishes or desires are vulgar or common. It comes from Chaucer’s play Troilus and Criseyde with help from Shakespeare’s version, Troilus and Cressida. 

Where these two words come together is in the middle of the debate over illegal immigration in the United States. Some Americans believe the country should grant amnesty—a period during which the immigration law will not be enforced—to illegal immigrants who have shown that they are hard workers and taxpayers, especially if they have children, since any child born in the United States has the right to be an American citizen, even if their parents are not. 

Those people who disagree with the idea of amnesty, therefore, believe politicians who do support it are pandering in order to get more votes from people who think the amnesty is a good idea. Voilà, Hispandering. 

UPDATE: More photos here.

Recent interesting catchwords from the Double-Tongued Dictionary:

read-alike n. a (fiction) book whose contents are similar to another book’s.

violin hickey n. a mark left on the neck from playing the violin.

throw a Porsche at someone v. phr. in the British military, to fire an expensive missile at a target.

Q-tip cruise n. a pleasure trip aboard a ship, taken mainly by senior citizens. So named because the passengers have white hair that resembles the white cotton ends of Q-tips.

1-800 car n. a car that is outfitted with superficial and expensive after-market modifications that make it look good but do not improve its performance.

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In Howard Marks’ rollicking memoir of a life of crime, Mr Nice, he describes living as a fugitive from justice: “I was fully aware that any one of them could turn me in to the authorities at any time. I just big-headedly assumed that anyone who knew me liked me and wouldn’t do such a thing. I was too nice to be grassed.”

Tattling (tale-telling) is the sort of thing that rascals like Marks have to worry about, so it’s no surprise that the underworld has an abundance of synonyms for it.

To grass someone or to grass someone up means to report them and their activities to the police. While the expression is almost completely unknown in North America, in Britain and Australia no explanation is needed in the press and on televised police dramas.

There’s also a noun, grass, a person who tattles, and supergrass, someone who tattles so much that criminal empires crumble.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, grass is a shortening of grasshopper, which a hundred years ago was current rhyming slang for copper, meaning police.

However, it could also be rhyming slang for shopper, meaning a person who trades information to the police in exchange for favours. To shop someone to the police means to offer up evidence of their wrongdoing.

These expressions, too, are decidedly British and see little use in North America, except for copper, which has been permanently shortened there to cop.

Snout is yet another one unknown to most North Americans. Both as a verb and a noun, it is more or less the same as grass. It probably comes from the idea of sticking one’s nose – or snout – into someone else’s business. These slang uses of snout and grass come from the early 1920s and 1930s.

Snout, in turn, recalls snitch, yet another synonym for betraying someone to the authorities. Snitch once meant nose or a flick of the nose. To snitch on someone means to squeal or sing like a canary – to tell all dirt to devastating effect – though those latter two terms were probably more popular in black-and-white gangster movies than they ever were among real criminals.

More typically used in North America is nark, which was originally a Briticism dating from the mid-1800s but which has been used in the United States for at least a hundred years. In criminal circles, it especially applies to people who get benefits like leniency, money, news about competitors, etc, from telling tales to the police.

In schools, nark is not just the derogatory term for the kid who tells the teacher about the misbehaviour of classmates but the one who blabs a classmate’s embarrassing secret to the whole school.

However, the verb nark is a little more complex. In the United States, it has been reinforced by the word narc, which is a policeman or detective who specialises in narcotics crimes. Narc is a shortened form of narcotics, which means any illegal drugs, not just ones that make you drowsy. Both the C and K spellings are used interchangeably.

Nark and narc have been tangled up with movie and television plots in which a perp (short for “perpetrator”, a person accused of a crime) trades information about someone else’s drug crime in exchange for a lighter sentence or even for getting off scot-free.

(Scot is an archaic name for a type of payment similar to a tax, so if you’re scot-free, you are free from “paying” by way of punishment or other obligation.)

A word similar to nark is stool pigeon. At its earliest, a stool was a type of decoy used by bird-hunters. A life-like (or dead) bird is perched and then manipulated by a hidden hunter so that the bird seems alive. The intention is to draw real birds into believing there is easy prey to be had.

In modern use, it means a police informer, but it has historically been used to mean a decoy or person used as a front for a criminal operation. The metaphorical uses of stool pigeon to mean a person who is controlled by another seem to have first been used in the 1830s. Such a person is fronting – pretending to the criminals to be something they’re not – so that they can lure the criminals into a false sense of safety. Pigeon, stool, and stoolo are all synonymous variants.

Louse, snake and weasel are still more ways to call someone a nasty name for an informer, though they are also perfectly good general terms of abuse. Rat, too, though it is now a bit dated but oh-so-evocative.

Rat shares a connection with another informer, a ratfink, which in turn can be shortened to fink. Ratfink contains within all the loathing we feel for dark, scurrying creatures that thrive on our filth and are loathed even by the loathsome.

fog line the bright lines painted near a road’s edge to guide drivers.

instant ancestor n. an old photograph of strangers used as decoration.

trashout when a tenant is forced out of a house due to foreclosure or eviction and leaves it in a squalid state.

Slang is the language of young people. It is a fast-moving river and although its bends and flows seem the same, they are, they must be, composed of different cascades and crests. We learn the slang of our generation and it is always the slang we know best, but our slang terms are usually new words for old ideas.

Look at the generational ways of saying “goodbye.” In the 1980s, “I’m out of here” became “outta here” which became the interjection “audi,” spelled after the car brand, and, therefore, sometimes rendered as “Audi 5000.” Although it’s a bit old-fashioned, some folks still use it where “so long!” might have been used in the 1940s.

In the 1960s, you might have said, “I’m gonna jet” meaning “I’m going to leave.”

In the 1980s, “to blaze” was another way of saying that you’re leaving. Like “audi” and “jet” you still hear it from time to time. It may never be very popular, though, because its space is blocked. A newer, more common meaning for “to blaze” has arisen: “to smoke marijuana.”

And that’s just as well. One of the key traits of slang—what distinguishes it from standard English, from jargon, and from simple humorous wordplay—is its synonymy.

Slang tends to have many words for the same ideas. A zillion words for sex acts or sex organs, bucketloads of admiring and rude terms for men and women, lots of ways to call people smart and stupid, an endless supply of adjectives meaning bad and good, and an astonishingly large list of terms for drugs and alcohol.

So, of course, slang doesn’t need “to blaze” to say “to leave.” It has, for example, “to bounce” with the same meaning. “Let’s bounce! Mikey’s got a band playing at his house.”

“Roll” is another one. “We’re done here. Let’s roll.” It calls on the American preoccupation with cars, suggests something of a caravan (in the sense of a parade of vehicles, not in the sense of a habitable vehicle used by British pensioners on holiday), and has an air of a police action or the military about it. It suggests a band embarking at once in an organised fashion to a specific destination to do something together.

Slang is alchemistic: it has many curious properties. On one hand, it can sound so extraordinarily old-fashioned or out-of-date that even the most dull-witted person can tell that a term is, as they say, radioactive, meaning that if you use it you will be marked as clueless—out of touch, out of fashion, and not even close to being cool. Slang carries with it invisible “best when used by” dates.

Think of “bling” or “bling bling” meaning “ostentatious jewelry or adornment.” It arose from a hip-hop song in 1999 and became overused in less than a year. It soon appeared in advertisements on the sides of buses. Once ad agencies or newsmagazines have picked up on a slang word, if it is not already uncool they are sure to kill it by overexposure.

Slang thrives from a sense of novelty and a sense of being privileged knowledge. You hardly get that if an airline is selling seats with it.

On the other hand, slang, if it does not catch the ears and eyes of the popular press and the writers of popular television and movies, can endure for generations, with each new younger set feeling that the “best when used by” date has not passed.

I’m thinking, for example, of a term for “drunk”—“tore up” or “torn up.” My colleague Connie Eble at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, collects slang from her students every semester. “Tore up” appears on her list from autumn 2006, defined as “extremely drunk,” and given with the synonyms “plastered,” “smashed,” “trashed,” and “wasted.”

Yet, that term was already in use in the 1950s.

“Bomb,” as in “to fail an examination,” is also on the 2006 list, yet dates to the early 1960s. “To bone someone” meaning to have sex with them, which dates to at least as early as the 1970s, is also on the minds of young people in 2006.

I wonder if those students know they’re using slang that is older than they are?

Note that at about four minutes in Jonathon (whom I know professionally and communicate with via email from time to time) talks about his upcoming historical dictionary of slang. Since then, it has been announced that Oxford University Press will not be publishing that dictionary, and, alas, it cannot go by the acronym of GODS, the Green Oxford Dictionary of Slang. Most major dictionaries have fairly standard acronyms among lexicographers, you see, and it would be rather nice to get one like that.

Instead, it was announced in October that Chambers Harrap would be publishing it. So perhaps the acronym will be CHUDS, the Chambers Harrap Universal Dictionary of Slang. (The article misspells Jonathon’s first name, by the way, even though Bookseller.com have since been sent a correction.)

It’s the usual stuff: it has a gee-whiz tone, it has wacky words littered throughout, it barely scratches the surface, and it makes light of “geeks” and “nerds.” The last two paragraphs are rewrites or direct quotes from my long post, Language Evolution in the Digital Age, which is fine, I guess, but since the article fails to include any URLs, nobody but you, me, and the writer will ever know. That’s old media for you.

Also, it says I “help” run Double-Tongued Dictionary. I don’t “help,” I do run it. It is 100% my show. I have a few people on the “about” page who are contributors, but only one contributes regularly.

So what is this? This is what a Craiglist apartment scam looks like. The Craiglist abuse department took own the ad yesterday, but not before I made a PDF of it as backup. Besides two pictures of a neat, well-furnished apartment, it has this:

$1100 / 2br - frunished 2 bedrooms 2 baths apt (Upper West Side)
12 W 68th St !
This is a building just right next to central Park where all the funs takes place here in NY, is few steps to central Park and you can have a full view from this Unit. Lincoln center is close by and Damrosh Park is near by, the cross streets are central Park west and Broadway easy to access and lots of security.

Utilities Included: Heat,Electric,Gas,Water,AC

If you know New York City real estate, your alarm bells are ringing. A two-bedroom apartment in that neighborhood in New York City does not rent for $1100. My first thought was that it should rent for at least double that.

Then I looked at the pictures. Newish building, nice floors, big windows, lots of space, expensive furnishings. My second though was that the apartment should be at least $2800 a month.

Then I re-considered the location. I put it closer to $3800 a month.

Also, the ad says the cross streets are Central Park West and Broadway. No, they’re not. Twelve West 68th Street is between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. Broadway is one block further to the west.

Also the mention of Damrosch Park is curious. Who gives a damned about Damrosch Park when you have Central Park a few hundred feet away and when Damrosch is four blocks away on the other side of Broadway and Lincoln Center? Nobody, that’s who.

I figured it was probably a scam, but just in the off chance it was a poorly written and miscategorized ad, I emailed the guy. You see that sometimes: somebody only wants to rent out their apartment for a week and they forget to say so in the ad, making it look like $1100 is the rent for a month, and they make the mistake of not putting it in the short-term rentals. Also sometimes people do a bad copy-and-paste job from one ad to another but they mean no harm. It happens.

But then I got a response from ohus223@aol.com.

Hello and than you for your interest in my apt.
I am the owner and the apt is available immediately,
I am now working at the US Embassy in London, UK (Great Britain) i will work here at least 4 years. Because i can’t come to the US to show you the apartment will make the deal only via Rent.com . To see,inspect and then rent the apartment you will have to send me your details:

Name:
Address:
City:
State:
Zip:

I would also like to know a bit more details about you and a bit about your credit score.

The rent terms are simple:

You can rent the apartment from 6 months to 6 years.
1100$/Month
1 Month Advance 1100$
1 Month Safety Deposit in advance (1100$)

The transaction will be done via Rent.com(an eBay company)

After you send me the details i will start the transaction. You will receive the transaction info and the invoice. I am the apartment owner so because i am out of the country and the apartment has furniture and appliances worth over 30,000$ to see the apt you will have to send a safety deposit, i will not receive this deposit, the payment details will be unavailable to me, i will get the payment only if you decide to rent the apartment, if you do not rent the apartment you will get the money back the same day. After your deposit is verified you will receive the rental agreement and the property key so you can inspect the apartment. After the inspection:

If you do not want to rent the apartment you will receive the deposit back the same day. You will have to return the rental agreement and the key.

If you want to rent the apartment the safety deposit will be given to me and I will keep it as guarantee in case something happens with the furniture/appliances etc. You will receive this money when you do not want to rent the apartment anymore, if everything in the apartment has not been damaged.

The apartment is very close, in walking distance to local transport, bus metro etc. has just been renovated, totally finished, flexible lease, is nice, clean, quiet, has all the facilities and the utilities a man needs including electric Utility, Cable TV, Parking, Laundry in the bldg, Air conditioning, high speed internet, workout facility, well behaved pets are allowed.

The rent is for the whole apartment NOT just a shared room. This is not a sublease, etc, i am the OWNER.

I hope you are a serious person.
Regards,

-- APT DETAILS
2 Bd. Apartment
12 W 68th St, New York, NY 10023

This is a building just right next to central Park where all the funs takes place here in NY, is few steps to central Park and you can have a full view from this Unit. Lincoln center is close by and Damrosh Park is near by, the cross streets are central Park west and Broadway easy to access and lots of security.
 
Utilities Included: Heat,Electric,Gas,Water,AC

Here is the email message as a PDF, which includes more pictures of the apartment. The message is scammeriffic. All the tells are there. It’s 99.99% sure to be a scam, a fraud, a rip-off.

1. The scammer forgot to give a name but is quick to claim to work at the US Embassy in London. It’s an inversion of the normal priority: the first information should be readily divulged, the latter only rarely and cautiously. He’s claiming to work someplace with authority, yet uses an AOL address, doesn’t give further credentials, doesn’t offer references, not even a building manager, superintendent, neighbor, anybody.

2. He’s asking for money just to view the apartment. Nobody reputable will ever ask you to pay money just to view a prospective apartment. Never ever. Walk away. The way it would be handled by somebody reputable is through a broker or management company. This is a town filled with them. Again, you will never be asked to pay money to look at an apartment in this town by anyone who is honest.

3. He invokes “Rent.com(an eBay company)” as if it’s some kind of money-handling authority. To the best of my knowledge, Rent.com is only a listing service and doesn’t handle the transfer of money from renters to landlords. This means he’s probably going to give me the URL to a fake site that claims to be Rent.com and claims to do escrow; that is, it supposedly will hold my money until such time as I authorize its release. Instead, what would happen is that I would sign over my money, he’d receive it, and I’d never hear from him again.

4. He’s obsessed with the money. Most of the message is about money. That, too, is an inversion of priorities. Also, the dollar sign comes after the amount. Maybe he’s a European who owns an apartment here, maybe not, but the email seems designed, otherwise, to make one think the scammer is American, specifically the talk of working there for four more years. Also, the overall writing level is poor and disjointed. The State Department surely requires better performance than that, no matter what you think of its actions or politics. I’d expect somebody working in the US Embassy and owning an expensive apartment to have the best education and the high-quality presentation skills that go with it. Writing well would be ingrained.

5. The list of information for which he’s asking. It’s not that he’s asking for it, it’s the list. Scam after scam, time after time, again and again, features that list or one very similar. In looking at the dozens of 419 scam letters and the “foreign agent” scam letters ("we need someone to ship us merchandise or redirect funds to us") that I’ve received over the last week, I see that many of the 419 scammers include “The List” and ALL of the foreign agent scammers do.

On the off chance I was misreading the email and it was authentic, I googled the building address. Turns out, it’s a historic building and it has a web site with pictures of the building and a list of apartments. This was the clincher: the Craigslist ad is with 100% certainty a scam.

1. The window configuration shown in the scammer’s photos is impossible and does not match the building at all.

2. The view out the scammer’s photos does not match the view on Google street view.

3. There’s no two-bedroom apartment at 12 West 68th Street. There is one in the adjoining 14 West 68th Street, but the photos don’t match at all.

4. There is a 3 to 4 bedroom apartment for rent in the building. The asking price is $7000. I think that confirms my estimate of about $3800 a month for a two-bedroom in that building. That price isn’t a sign of someone desperate for money: they could just knock a few hundred off the going rate, not thousands, and still have renters lined up to sign up.

I sent the scammer one more email trying to get a name. He wrote back, claiming his name is “Gary Barts” and repeating most of the same information in the previous emails. This one is even more about the money.

So, la-di-da, scammer, and goodbye. I’ve done my best to make this as googleable as all get-out.

I would post the raw source of the emails, but since he’s using an AOL account, there’s no indication of his original sending location.

...

It’s a spoiling good time listening to the millions of voices in New York City. Sometimes a little piece of all that talk changes your language.

For example, if you take a ride in a yellow taxicab, you’ll see a metal emblem riveted to the hoods. That medallion shows that the car’s owner has purchased the right to operate on city streets.

The opposite of the licensed taxis are the gypsy cabs. Gypsy is used to describe something that roams ungoverned. Cabs of all kinds are one of the causes of gridlock, coined in 1980. Gridlock means that there’s such a traffic jam that all the vehicles are going nowhere.

Dollar vans are another way people get around the five boroughs of New York City. These are privately owned passenger vans that operate along loose regular routes, just like city-run buses. They used to cost only a dollar, thus the name, but, like everything else, the dollar vans now usually cost more than a dollar.

A borough, by the way, is a political division within a city. Each of the city’s five boroughs in turn has its own named neighbourhoods. Inside the borough of Manhattan, for example, are neighbourhoods like the Lower East Side and Chinatown.

Besides lending the vast lexicon of food items that can be eaten in the vast dim sum halls of Chinatown, the Chinese experience here has left other terms in English.

According to lurid newspaper reports from the late 1800s and the early 1900s, the hatchet was the favourite weapon of assassins working on behalf of the Chinese tongs. The assassins were, of course, called hatchet men, a term that first appeared in New York City and San Francisco.

Now a hatchet man is someone who writes negative things about someone else on behalf of a third person. Consultants who are paid to tell large corporations that they need to fire thousands of people are also called hatchet men.

A term you will still see occasionally is highbinder, which in the early 1800s meant a violent criminal or thug. The word was taken from the name of the High-binders, an Irish gang.

Highbinder was later used to refer to a member of a secret Chinese criminal gang, especially an assassin. By 1890 it referred to a slimy – disreputable or untrustworthy – politician.

This is the life of words: they travel paths of transformation. Like hatchet man, highbinder has become less negative over the years. These days it is mainly an inkhorn term, one used by journalists to show off their thesauruses.

A word that thrived in the late 1800s and early 1900s in New York City but now appears to have completely fallen out of the language is lobbygow.

In a well-known murder trial in 1914, one of the witnesses described a lobbygow as “a pal and a friend willing to do almost anything he is told”. Early police literature describes lobbygows as white men who run errands for the powerful Chinese underworld bosses.

By the 1930s, a lobbygow was a person who would lead tourists on slumming tours of Chinatown. The middle and upper classes could get a first-hand look at how the lower class lived. Lobbygows were believed to be as likely to lead someone to a planned mugging as they were to show them opium dens.

Like language, the city changes. There are no more opium dens and no longer do the tenements – crowded apartment buildings – of the Lower East Side house the heart of the city’s Jewish community.

But we still have the Yiddish term schnook, meaning a sucker, a rube, or a loser, a term which dates to the early 1940s in English. It’s related to shmuck and schmo, which are similar Yiddish-derived terms.

Even further entrenched in English is shtick. Shtick is sometimes used these days to refer to anybody’s standard way of behaving, either to get attention or to get something they want.

As far back as the 1960s it meant a theatre performer’s routine, the thing they do in order to get paid. An actor or anybody with a public persona who has need, on occasion, to haul out their shpiel – synonymous to the German spiel, meaning a long story or rehearsed routine – probably has a shtick.

A typical shpiel is what you hear from a salesman who tries to sell you things. Just the other day, an annoying election campaigner came to the house to ask about my political opinions. I threw him out on his tukkus —Yiddish for rear end, rump, or buttocks.

lysdexia n. a joking name for dyslexia, a learning disorder.

rain garden n. a piece of low, damp ground planted with vegetation that is suitable for rainwater that collects there.

infant-mortality failure n. a breakdown of a piece of machinery that is new or has recently been rebuilt.

citjo n. a citizen journalist.

floppy n. a comic book, so-named to distinguish it from a thicker graphic novel.

supermajor n. one of the handful of very large petroleum companies.