Vice Slang | Tom Dalzell | Talks at Google

All right, just going to go ahead and get started here. Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming. We're very happy to have Tom Dalzel speak with us today about his book, the Dictionary of Slang in Unconventional English. Tom is a lawyer by day whose secondary occupation is a slang collector and author. In addition to his very busy day job, he's devoted a considerable portion of his life, I guess it's safe to say, to the study of American slang and has a large personal collection of. Of books on slang and unconventional English numbering close to 2,000, and he's recognized as a national expert on the topic. Tom is the senior editor of the new Partridge Dictionary of Slang, an unconventional English series, some of which you'll have copies of today. And one of the interesting things about slang, of course, is that because it evolves so quickly and phrases come and go into being, it gives us kind of that microcosmic view of how language is a larger entity sort of evolves, which I find personally very interesting. And Tom was showing me the. His larger dictionary, the slang dictionary, is part of a much larger volume. And it's very interesting to see, for those of us who are just interested in how information like this and phrases come and pass into being, it really is a neat thing and a treat to kind of see some of the etymology. I'm not even sure if etymology is the right term for this, how it comes into being. So that being said, we're very lucky to have an expert like Tom here today. We have a microphone set up in the corner over there, so if you have any questions, please definitely use those. Use that for our YouTube audience. And with that, please join me in giving Tom a warm welcome to Google today.

Thank you. You know, as I spent a few hours here before this speech, it occurs to me how completely 20th century, if not 19th century, what I do is, and I'll explore with you today a little bit some of my observations about slang and making slang dictionaries, the role of slang in culture and where I think it's going. I have spent, as Tyler mentioned, quite a bit of time in the last 20 years studying and appreciating American slang. And, you know, after 20 years, I still don't have an easy time answering the very first question, which is, what is slang? There is no purity test for what is slang, what is not slang. But in general, slang is language that does one or two of the following things. It lowers the formality of a conversation or a written communication and. Or usually. And it identifies from one speaker to the other that we are both Members of the same subculture culture, counterculture subgrouping, tribe, whatever. So aside from the meaning of the word, it imparts a membership. And it can be something as large as we are all Americans to something as specific as we are all surfers on this beach in Santa Cruz. It's language that binds us together as people and serves as a marker. And it is a close relative of another, of several other types of speech, dialect, which would generally be defined by region, but not always jargon, colloquial language, or idiom. And as I said, there's no real purity test. There's no standards board somewhere that says, this is slang, this is colloquial. It's very subjective, but it's there. And with jargon, for example, jargon is the language of an occupation. But within that, there is slangy jargon. Every occupation that I know of has its own specialized vocabulary to describe things, people, processes. But every occupation also has a more slangy or colloquial way of defining things that you do. And that serves that same function that I was talking about, of binding people together. We are all railroad workers. We are all linemen for an electric utility or whatever. It's not the words that you find in training manuals. It's language that forces its way in to bind people together. Slang is, above all, it is a window into a culture or a subculture. And I suggest that if you want to have a real feel for what surfing culture is as an outsider, there's no better way to do that than to pick up a book by a guy named Trevor Crawley called the Surfinary Reading the Language of Surfers. The culture comes screaming through the that window to have a sense of what pre Stonewall, pre aids, gay male life in America was. There's no better way than reading the Queen's Vernacular. Picking up a copy of that, a book by Bruce Rogers, 1972. The language tells you about the culture. The same with baseball. The same. The language tells you an awful lot about the culture. And that's my great interest. It's not the words per se, but what they tell us about the culture. Jumping now to making a dictionary in general, you know, the process is fairly simple and straightforward. Typically, what a dictionary company will do is they will produce a list of head words, words that they know that they want to have included. They will gather citations, they will define the words, identify the part of speech, they will try to date to the earliest usage, and then they will present it. And the great dictionaries in the English language, all of merriam Webster's dictionaries and the Oxford English Dictionary are based on slips of paper. When I said that, it was a lot of what I do is 20th or 19th century. It's really 19th century. If you walk into the offices of Merriam Webster in Springfield, Massachusetts, the great American dictionary maker, you will find file cabinets that have 6 million citations on slips of paper. Some in the handwritten notes from Noah Webster, some computer generated from a year ago. They have a program there at Merriam Webster that's fascinating. Everybody who works for the company spends a certain number of hours, whether they're a secretary or an editor, a certain number of hours every week reading for citations, and they go into slips. Same thing with Oxford English Dictionary. If you read the professor and the Madman, you know, wonderful and vaguely accurate account of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. You know that in the 19th century, a lot of handwritten slips and they still exist in Oxford. If you go to Oxford University, they have a building that's climate controlled. Where those original slips are typically dictionaries. It's labor intensive. There are large staffs and they work largely from written sources. They will not put something in a dictionary. A word does not make it into any major dictionary without a number of written sources. Perhaps arbitrary, but it certainly is a rule. Slang dictionaries have been around as long as dictionary dictionaries have. Samuel Johnson, we just hit the 400th anniversary of that. But in the 17th century, Martin Luther, as in the diet of worms and a mighty Fortress is our God, published a slang dictionary of the slang of German beggars, Benjamin Franklin in 1737. One of his earliest publications was a little dictionary with several hundred synonyms, slang synonyms for drunk. In the late 1700s, the English became fascinated with the language of. Of thieves and gamblers and the underworld. And there are a number of dictionaries from the late 1700s in England. The first American slang dictionary was published in 1865 by the editor of the Police Gazette. So it was based on the great fascination with the language of criminals that he had a guy named Maitland. The most prominent slang lexicographer of the 20th century was a man named Eric Partridge, whose work I continued. He first published his dictionary of slang in unconventional English in 1937. He was from New Zealand, moved to England in World War I, and published until 1984 was his last edition. And so he really defined slang lexicography in the 20th century. The slang dictionaries, much smaller staffs than the huge staffs put together by Oxford or by Merriam Webster, American Heritage generally don't have the luxury of people out there doing reading for us. We find with slang a couple of things that we don't find with standard English. One is, as Tyler mentioned in his introduction, it comes and goes very quickly. There's a woman at University of North Carolina named Connie Ebley who teaches Chaucer but has studied slang since she started teaching there in the early 70s. Every year she has a freshman English class write down on index cards 10 words current slang. So she has a very large database built on that note. Completely scientific, but it's the best that there is. And from hers you see about a 10% survival rate from one year to another of a slang term. And generally with slang, it takes a while before a word makes it into print. It's generally used quite a bit in speech before it shows up in print. And because we rely on print, we're at something of a disadvantage. Written sources are a little bit less compelling with slang than they are with standard English. But to do it any other way is really difficult to go out and do fieldwork. There are a number of slang dictionaries that are based on fieldwork. They're almost exclusively prisoners who've done dictionaries while in prison. And they're wonderful books. You know, they're not textbook examples of precise lexicography, but they certainly capture the language of prison. Bringing. Coming now to Eric Partridge or the work that I did going around, there are several books that I've been working on. This, I think, is one of the ones going on that's a concise version of this, which is 2,400 pages designed for libraries that was 10 years in the making. And for that we gathered slang of the English speaking world since 1945. Eric Partridge, who was a big name in lexicography and a brand that his publisher wanted to continue with us, was very good about the language of World War I. Between the wars, he really understood RAF pilots in World War II, but he completely missed it after that because you have to. Slang is so tied into a culture. If you cannot appreciate the culture, you're not going to get the language. And so when we hit the beats of the 50s and the hippies of the 60s, he was just absolutely perplexed. I mean, he defined them as he would call hippies, beatniks and everything was everybody was a drug addict and he just plain missed the culture and couldn't understand it. And I'm really relating to that now because I'm 56 and I made it through having some Academic understanding of rap and hip hop. I could not connect viscerally, but I could still have an academic understanding of it. But anything that comes after that, I'm going. I am useless, I think, as a slang lexicographer, because I. I think that you have to have an appreciation of the culture that you're talking about, or you will not understand what the word is trying to do, how it brings people together. And as I said, Partridge really missed it, seeing everybody as a drug addict or a beatnik. And also he was very. As a New Zealander, he was a very proud member of the Commonwealth. And so he excluded anything that came from the United States from his dictionaries. He included Great Britain and her dominions. And when he really liked an American word, he'd call it Canadian and stick it in there. So we were starting with Partridge, an imperfect but a big name and somebody who was very important. And he was more important than he was good. But that's where we started. I had written two books about slang before getting into this, both from Merriam Webster in Massachusetts. The first is Flappers to Rappers, which is American youth slang, teenage slang, from the era of the flapper in the 1920s to the rapper in the 1990s, going decade by decade. And then I wrote the Slang of Sin, which sort of goes sin by sin, from gambling to horse racing to drugs to drinking to pinball, to tattoos. Everything that people considered sins over the years, the slang of those went to work here on this big project. We had contributors from United Kingdom, from Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean, South Africa and India. And we didn't. I was in charge of the American. And because Partridge had not collected or not attributed words to the United States, I didn't really have anything to work with in terms of whittling down what he did and adding. So I just plunged myself into probably 1000 books. Reading popular literature between 1945 and the present. Novels, nonfiction, newspapers, underground newspapers from the 60s, screenplays, lyrics. Every book that was written by a stripper, every book written by prostitutes, pimps, prisoners. I spent a lot of time with the literature of professional wrestling. Every book written by drug addict. I think surfers, truck drivers, Valley girls, rappers reading the Dicker papers from San Francisco in 68, the Berkeley Bar Oracle, Black Panthers, the Black Panther Papers, and then some really obscure things. The Mattachine Society, which was gay men in New York in the 50s, MIT Model Railroad Club was absolutely fascinating. Really, really bright guys in the 1950s. And a lot of the language that you see in the early Computer years came out of the MIT Model Railroad Club and somebody's nodding with some appreciation of the MIT Model Railroad Club. So I read and I read and I read and you know, it made for interesting, interesting vacations. And I'm looking around for my daughter, who's. There she is okay. Who as a 14 year old had to go on vacations with me with, with all of my pimp books and sit on a beach in Puerto Rico when I'm reading the autobiography, the Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim. So probably not the most embarrassing thing that I ever did, but it made for interesting airplane reading. Why are you reading that? And as I read, I made little check marks in the margin when I saw a word that I liked. And then I'd create a list of the words and the page numbers and go through and enter them into a database. And I mean, it was the slips of paper from the professor and the madman from the Oxford English Dictionary in 1850 with a very simple database that Routledge, my publisher in England, put together. And so it was just generating through immersion in the literature, the headword list, the 30,000 words that made it into the dictionary. Incredibly simplistic, defining as I went. And then when I got done, I did clean up and went back and looked at a few other slang dictionaries. And when there was a word that I wanted, I either picked them out of other slang dictionaries or single subject dictionaries. I turned to electronic dictatorship databases, literature databases, dabbled with inside the Book at Amazon, used LexisNexis. But then along came the Google Book project, which absolutely was a godsend for me as a slang lexicographer. It is really a tremendous tool. And I and slang lexicographer friends, Oxford English Dictionary are coming up with incredible predatings, antedatings of first usages by the use of Google Books. And for anything since 1980, using the Google group search, great source. I mean, we can pick up, you can usually pick up three or four years, which becomes in our little obsessive world of who can get the earliest date for something, you can usually pick up three or four years on newspapers by going into groups. And Google groups. Groups is just great for that. So here we have the 2,400 pages full of citations from the thousand books that I read. You know, I probably slipped a little bit of my political views into it, where for example, every time I'm talking about OxyContin, all the. Or hillbilly heroin or any of the slang terms for it, I try to find A citation that mentioned Rush Limbaugh being addicted to it. Just sort of slipping that in. But it's just this wide range of popular culture that comes out with the citations. This is a library book. The one that's passing around is concise. That's every word minus citations, minus the fun part. And then there are the two sort of side products that are going around, sex and vice, that are drawn from here. 3,000 headwords each, and really, really fun citations. And I'm really going to. I'm not even that tempted to read any of the. Read any samples. But fun, fun writing, funny stuff. Let me make a few observations about slang. Having spent 20 years reading it, reading what people write about it as a species. I think we really are wired to invent language when we come to work. There's what I was saying earlier about jargon turning slangy. There's an established standard vocabulary for everything that we do, and we invent new words right away. And it doesn't matter whether you're a highly educated engineer or a high school graduate who's out working in an oil field or a line crew or a railroad. People invent words, words. And it's not necessarily coming up with new words to describe new things. Young people seem especially committed. It's almost a generational imperative to come up with new language. In the 1930s, a marijuana cigarette was a twister. Perfectly good word for it. Turned into a reefer, turned into a joint, turned into a dubie, turned into a blunt pod turned into pod, into grass, into weed, into dope. We didn't need to invent new words, but we like it. We do it. So young people seem very wired for it. People who are oppressed are great users of slang. Slang becomes a gesture of resistance. That is one reason, and I'll touch on this a little bit more in a minute or so, that African American slang is so rich. African American community has used slang both as a gesture of resistance, holding people together and fighting back. You find great slang in prison, where people are oppressed. You'll find great slang among enlisted soldiers in the army, especially during wartime. They hate being in war. They hate their officers. They are oppressed. You'll find it in immigrant communities. You'll find it in gay and lesbian communities, more gay than lesbian, for reasons that I don't understand. But where there's oppression by the dominant culture, you will find slang being used by people in a very rich and important way. The slang of sin, the slang of vice. It seems that when we start breaking the rules that Society has for the way we're supposed to behave. When we lose our inhibitions about the way we're behaving, we also lose our inhibitions about language and have very, very rich and indentive slang vocabulary. Within gambling, for example, with street crafts, which would be the most illegal, is the richest slang. And I don't know much if any slang that comes from a legal lottery. So the more we break the rules, the better the language is. Sports also seem to when we're having fun watching sports, there's quite a bit of slang there. That's one area I've not worked in an awful lot. As I mentioned, slang generally speaking has a pretty short shelf life. Although there are words such as cool that had an awful long run and cool came in 1947 and has never really disappeared. Slang also gets co opted often by the time we see it in print when, when the Flintstones Vitamins for Kids start using hip hop language, you know that it's dead and then something new gets invented. But mainstream culture, especially advertising, loves to co op edgy slang try to slang. I mean, I'm talking about language as if it's alive and actually has an intelligence of its own. And I know that it's notional. But slang also has a way of reinventing itself or resurrecting reinventing itself. Let me trace a word. In 1904, all of a sudden people start saying something is hip and then shortly after that is hep. Hip and hep are used interchangeably. All kinds of theories on where the word comes from. Whether there was a bartender in Cincinnati named Joe Hepb who knew everything that was going or because people would keep a flask of whiskey on their hip. I mean, the answer is nobody knows. There's a theory that comes from a West African language, wolof from Senegal, where there's a word xipi that means eyes wide open. Many, many theories, nobody where it comes from, but anyways. And then in the 20s and 30s it turns into hip, cat and hipster and hepcat. In the 1960s or in the 50s there's a hippie before the flower children hippie, there's the Lenny Bruce hippie, the person who hangs out with jazz musicians, then become the flower children hippies and then hip hop in 82. So it's a word that here in 2008 is 104 years ago, hip bursts in and then it becomes part of major words for a century. And also slang has a way, as I said, of resurrecting the word groovy was a big word in the 1940s, started in 37, 1946, you start seeing on a Walt Disney greeting card, so you know it's dead and then sort of completely disappears. And then in 1963, the Beach Boys have a song, it's not a big motorcycle, just a groovy little motorbike. And then groovy is a huge word in the 60s and then has an interesting third life and then disappears and has an interesting third life right now, which is completely ironic. That's groovy. I mean it's a put down word. Now for something that's hopelessly out of style or you're. Or it's not good. So you see this coming and going. A lot of the language of early hip hop in the 1980s. You'll find in 1930s books about African American slang. It just went away. The word fly was a huge word with Cab Calloway and African American musicians. Jazz musicians in the 30s sort of disappeared. Came back in the blaxploitation movies of the 1970s. Superfly sort of disappeared, then shows up as a huge word in hip hop in the 1980s. The last general observation about slang that I have to make is that the contribution to mainstream slang by African American slang is absolutely immense. And it has been since the late 1930s when white America started really listening seriously to black jazz, to the big bands, to swing. When Cab Calloway hit big with jitterbugging in the late 30s, he sold little dictionaries that were called. The first one was called a Hep Catalog and then it became Hepsters punning on Hepster's Dictionary that kids could actually take home and study the language that they were supposed to be using. Actually there's a movie called Swing Kids. I don't know if anybody's seen it. That's set in Germany, pre war Germany. And they're kids who are listening to Django Reinhardt and American jazz. Were trying to learn American hip words. But since then, the absolute immense contribution into American popular culture in general. But slang from African American vernacular English cannot be understated. I think that this is the last big slang dictionary that's going to be done with people reading, not relying on databases. The potential is really immense for it's almost unimaginably immense for what could be done with the resources of Google and also electronic databases. You know, as far as I've seen, nobody's really targeting fringe literature as part of electronic databases, which is where we find a lot of slang. The subculture magazines, underground newspapers, pulp fiction. But I think Google is certainly on the cutting edge of getting the body of knowledge and of what has been written out there in a searchable form and is a great tool for us. And I hope at some point to meet somebody from Google Books and talk about what might be done. That's what I have to say. Questions? Comments? Question in the red shirt.

So this may be answered in your books, which I had a chance to look at. But where's the line? Or is there a line between slang? You mentioned words and slang expressions. So clearly a word about loop or something like that is clearly slang implemented within the culture. Whereas something like not so much, which is very popular today, is an ironic way of saying no.

Right.

Is there any word at all?

Well, I think that they're both members of the same family. And it's a really interesting point because an awful lot of slang is nothing more than standard English with an attitude. Awesome. Excellent. I mean, that's just perfectly standard English, but with a little bit of Bill and Ted's excellent Adventure or Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont, it turns into slang. And I think that the line that I worry about more, I mean, both of them, I don't really distinguish them. You know, grody is invented. 65 or so becomes really big with the valley girl in 82. But I think it's just as important as awesome or excellent or. Actually, when Julia was in junior high school, one of my favorites is the word random as used by young people. I mean, that was a really random remark he made. I mean, it's just. It's a perfectly good standard word that is used brilliantly by young people to impart something. What I worry about more are people sitting around. I mean, Urban Dictionary is a very interesting project, but an awful lot of it is just people sitting around making up words and putting them on. So generally speaking, I mean, I'll read urban. I'll look at Urban Dictionary for entertainment, but not as a source of language. You know, I mean, the whole open source. I mean, it's open source to a fault, but. So those are the ones that I watch out more. And there was a really interesting. In 1991, there was a big article in the New York Times about the grunge movement in Seattle. And they had a whole box on grunge slang. And it was a woman who completely pranked them. She made up an entire vocabulary. And they thought, oh, we hit the mother lode. We hit the woman who really knows all the slang. She can tell us all about it. And here's the 20 words that everybody's using, and it was just a great prank and, you know, caused them some embarrassment. So I worry more not about the grotesque or humongous or the completely indented words. And some of them can pass. Skrillo was a word that was, I believe, invented by E40 in Vallejo, and they sort of invented it to mean money. And then it worked its way in. So maybe for the first year or two you ignored it, but then as it starts working its way in, you pay attention to it. Yes.

Do you find that there's a slang that seems to be referring for a period of time? You can't find the origin or whatever, but do you ever really feel like, oh, I've nailed the origin of that one, and are there commonalities of origins? Like, is it often a feature of whatever they're talking about, one of the five senses? Are there any commonalities?

Well, there are commonalities. And what are the most common things that people talk about in slang? Status is really big, good, bad, in, out, drunk, drugs, sex. Those are really the big ones. Vomiting. Those are the big ones. Are you ever really satisfied that you nailed it? No. Almost never. I mean, there's an example beatnik, everybody thinks they know that was coined by Herb Kane in the San Francisco Chronicle on such and such a date in 1957 or 1958. They believe he coined it. I mean, the word beat was there. Sputnik was up. He told them together he made beatnik. But you're never really sure because words can show up from different places at exactly the same time. In the. In the late 1920s, a New York newspaper held a contest for let's make up a word for somebody who ignores prohibition and drinks illegally manufactured alcohol. And two people submitted the same word, scoff law, which we still use. We generally use it about parking. Now, people ignore parking tickets and end up getting booted. But it was two different people invented the same word at the same time. And because slang is used so much more in speech before it shows up in writing, it's hard to get back to that first use. There are words that have absolutely huge. Cop would be one. False etymologies. I mean, there are so many stories about cop. Well, they used to have copper buttons or copper badges or there was a police chief who's known. I mean, those are all wrong. People make up stories. But I think that the not being sure where something comes from is the rule, and being sure is the exception. Yes, I had a Question.

How do you make the distinction between.

Focusing on written slang, things like text messaging and everything?

How do you make the distinction between something that's slang and something that's short nailed and how? Well, what I did is, I mean I had to think long and hard about text messaging and when I used my definition of slang, which is it lowers the formality and creates the bond saying that we are both in the same tribe or club, a lot of text messaging meets that test because you are lowering the formality and, and actually some of the more common ones, LOL or fwiw have certainly busted out of text messaging into everyday use. But we recorded a fair amount of text messaging stuff, if only as Tyler said in his introduction, as a snapshot of what's happening right now and whether it has any meaning in 10 years, I don't know. But if you could go in and create a corpus, which is you take all the language, you take a corpus. If you could get into Instant messenger in a way, or into MySpace or Facebook and get a corpus out of there, you would have a really interesting glance in. When I did flappers to wrappers, this one, one of my biggest sources was, was high school yearbooks from the 30s and 40s, things that were written. I generally didn't use things that people had signed them. But you go into the library and just look at, spend a couple hours, you're going to pick up 20 or 30 words that kids were using in the class of 39 that you might not find in any other dictionary. But yeah, it is a fine line because you could do. And people have done complete dictionaries of text, shorthand, but I used a lot of them because I think at this moment they are serving. So are gestures too. And actually we had a big debate about whether we're going to put gestures in, you know, for, you know, I mean there are plenty of them. Or even, I mean you could make sounds, you know, you could meow when you, you think somebody's being catty. Things like that, they all serve the same function. So we did put text messaging in.

Hi.

Do you think that short lived Internet fads deserve to be recognized as lying? I'm thinking of things like Lolcat or Rickroll or something like that.

It depends how short lived. But the answer is yes, because I.

Think.

If it's just a little flash in the complete flash in the pan. No, but things are changing so fast right now. I think that I would record that, although I don't have either of those terms. Mental note to myself, to go find some citations? Yes, I think so. Because it's now, you know, it might not be in five years and it might not be in three years. You know, who of us who lived through the Miller like commercials with what's up? I mean if you look at that just on the printed page 20 years from now, nobody's ever going to really understand how annoying that was and how many when people were walking around imitating it. But it was certainly a part of our culture where we identified ourselves as, as being cool by using that. But my answer would be yes. And you know, I don't think that anybody. Well, there's three editions of the Hackers Dictionary, but I'm not sure that anybody has really done a great job of from within the Internet doing that type of language.

Tom, you mentioned this a little bit during your talk, but do you think that slang and jargon in general, is it more inclusive because at the one time it's a marker of similarity and solidarity or exclusive because it's kind of, you know, pre information to people who are in the know, or do you think it's, it's some combination of both?

Well, there are some there, there are some that include and some that exclude hippies. In the 1960s it was extremely vague. You know, words like thing were really important and could mean anything. So it was very easy to use the, to use that language because it was a very reaching out type culture. Others there's almost, I mean one of the types of language I didn't mention is cant C A N T which is, is sort of the jargon of criminals. And in older days criminals had a language, safecrackers had their own language, Czech forgers had their own language. And the meaning was to exclude there to have to be able to speak with each other in a way that would not catch the attention of the general public or police. And I don't think that's true anymore. I think that police and prison guards know exactly what prisoners. But actually I spent one of my great long interviews, my field research was with a guy in the pornography industry who's since died named Jim Holiday. And he constructed for me a whole conversation that could be held in a restaurant about making a pornographic movie with it's more coded language. So you don't know what people are talking about. But I think in general it includes, you know, similar to the question about the text messaging, we had to decide what are we going to do about foreign language words. And that's especially true in the United States with border Spanish used by Mexican Americans in otherwise English conversation. We decided to include it. That's one that's a little bit more. A little bit more fenced in by throwing Mexican American border Spanish slang into an otherwise English conversation. That one. It serves both functions, I'd say more inclusive than exclusive.

Is there a sort of taxonomy of language you were talking about inclusive and exclusive? It seems that you could slice and dice that a little bit more. Things that are meant to be very precise and exclusive, like maybe a safe cracker jargon or something like the WhatsApp that catches on. It's got more of a meme, nice flavor.

I don't know what that first word meant though. But the taxonomy. But yes, that's absolutely true. I testified in a murder trial in Spokane a month ago about the term hiddle lick. And is that somebody who was charged with murdering a porn shop owner told somebody that he'd hit a lick. And did that mean I committed an armed robbery or did it mean something broad? But it does serve both functions of everybody and a few. Does that answer your question? I don't know what that first word meant. Oh, now, Eric Partridge. Absolutely. Eric Partridge had around 10 classifications of vulgar, coarse, high slang, low slang. I don't believe in that type of hierarchy, but the way you're describing it, there absolutely is. I mean, it can be a very small group, a very big group. It can be inclusive or exclusive. Generally speaking, I'd say it's a medium sized group and inclusive. Okay, well, going once, going twice.

Any other questions? Well, thanks for coming today. It was a pleasure to have you.

Thank you.