"It's raining old women with clubs."

For future reference.

and while we’re on the subject of slang…

This gem from 1811 is available at Project Gutenberg, and is filled (obviously) with slang, swears and insults from days of yore.

ACTIVE CITIZEN. A louse.

ADAM’S ALE. Water.

DAIRY. A woman’s breasts, particularly one that gives
  suck. She sported her dairy; she pulled out her breast.

PADDY. The general name for an Irishman: being the
  abbreviation of Patrick, the name of the tutelar saint of that
  island.

SPIT. He is as like his father as if he was spit out of his mouth; said of a child much resembling his father.

Profanity is alive and well on Twitter, except in Utah, apparently. You’d expect heathen citydwellers to swear, and we do not disappoint, but the Bible belt is pretty foul-mouthed too (no word whether language there trended cleaner on Sundays). Thanks to tweets, blog comments and unlocked Facebook feeds, we know more than ever before about the way regular people—in New York, Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, and the DMV—talk to each other, although everyone disagrees about the Internet’s effect on slang in general, and regional slang in particular.

A few months old, but this piece from the Awl that I must have missed about Twitter (and other social media) and local slang is worth your time.

This is Your Brain on Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s literary career, which spanned a quarter century roughly between the years 1587 and 1612, came at a time when the English language was at a powerful stage of development. The great fluidity of Early Modern English gave Shakespeare an enormous amount of room to innovate.

In all of his plays, sonnets and narrative poems, Shakespeare used 17,677 words. Of these, he invented approximately 1,700, or nearly 10 percent. Shakespeare did this by changing the part of speech of words, adding prefixes and suffixes, connecting words together, borrowing from a foreign language, or by simply inventing them, the way a rapper like Snoop Dogg has today. (Another exemplary instance is the way HBO’s series The Wire has integrated slang into our contemporary vernacular.)

Brave New Words

How does a word get into the venerable Oxford English Dictionary? Wide, long use is key. New-words editor Fiona McPherson enlists a small army of readers to comb through books, magazines, newspapers, and various online sources. Fresh words or meanings […] are added to a database; their usages are tracked for up to ten years. If “cankle,” for instance, pops up often enough, it may be one of the 4,000 words—out of 6,000 considered—that make the cut each year. Then it will be there to stay. “The OED is unique,” says McPherson, “in that we never remove a word once it has been included.”

Face palm, indeed. 

Teens Revive Languages Through Texting

Samuel Herrera, who runs the linguistics laboratory at the Institute of Anthropological Research in Mexico City, found young people in southern Chile producing hip-hop videos and posting them on YouTube using Huilliche, a language on the brink of extinction.

Herrera also discovered teens in the Phillippines and Mexico who think it’s “cool” to send text messages in regional endangered languages like Kapampangan and Huave.

Almost as soon as text messaging exploded on the world stage as a means to reach anyone, anywhere, and anytime, young people began to find a way to scale it back, make it more exclusive and develop their own code or doublespeak to use on the widely used devices.