Talking with Ben Zimmer and other crossword mavens this year inspired me to start making the mini crosswords that supporters at Patreon are getting now.
So during our current season break, I thought you'd enjoy hearing this episode.
That was also a bonus for supporters back in October.
Greetings, Grammarpalusians.
I am here again with Ben Zimmer linguist lexicographer, crossword puzzle writer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal and more.
And we're talking about antedating, finding older examples of words than are in the dictionary.
And Ben has some amazing stories for us.
Ben, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Hello.
Glad to extend the conversation.
Yeah, so much fun.
So you know I'm a West Coast girl and I am familiar with the bitchin' wicked dichotomy between the East Coast and West Coast.
But you have found out interesting things about the word hella, which you know.
To me is a word from the 90s, but it goes back much, much farther than that.
And so, like, tell us the story of hella.
Yeah, this is one of those words I've been kind of on the trail for quite a while.
And it's the type of thing that people will say yeah hella, like you're hella excited to mean very.
Or it can also mean many or much, depending on the context.
It's this thing that developed in the Bay Area, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and then spread from there.
And that's all true.
But then for a long time, the earliest examples that were found weren't even from the Bay Area.
The OED for a while had as their earliest citation something from the Toronto Star, I think, Toronto newspaper.
It's like, can we get back to the source a little better?
And so I kept looking and finding new places to look for sources to sort of trace it back, because I think it was 1987 is what the OED had.
And.
But there were people from the Bay Area, specifically East Bay, Oakland and Berkeley, who were saying oh yeah no, I use that all the time when I was growing up in the, you know, late 70s, early 80s or whatever.
Everybody was like, yeah, no, it was it went back much further than that.
But it was a question of where where to look.
And so I just, you know, started finding like earlier and earlier examples like.
From 86, it shows up in the lyrics of the rapper Too Short, who's from Oakland.
It was also getting used by one of the guys from Metallica in an interview that they did James Hetfield did in 86.
And it's like, okay, now we're getting somewhere.
At least these are people from the area who are using it.
And so I made some discoveries thanks to Internet Archive, which you can find at archiveorg, which is a wonderful resource freely available for everyone.
And they have been adding and adding to their various databases that kind of feed into their main archive.
And it's all searchable.
And so I started doing some searches there on some sources that were being added to the Internet Archive.
And there was one called the Bay Area Reporter.
And it was a long-running weekly newspaper that served the LGBTQ community.
And I started finding some examples there, but specifically in one columnist's work.
And it was somebody who went by the name Nespa or Nepa.
And his real name was actually Peter Palm.
But he was actually...
He had a bar in Oakland and he reported for the Bay Area Reporter on the nightlife in Oakland.
And so, going all the way back to 1982, I found in one of his columns he said until next time with the bits and pieces, take the time to find out about someone.
You just might be hella surprised.
He put he put hella surprise in quotation marks because probably you know it wasn't even kind of a known expression for everyone in the Bay Area at that time was maybe really localized to Oakland and thereabouts.
And so he put it in quotation marks because it was, you know, something that people in Oakland say.
And so I found a bunch of examples in those columns from the Bay Area Reporter from the early 80s.
But then someone suggested that there might be other ways to represent this same thing.
And that hell of spelling it as H-E-L-L, space O-F would be like another form of the same thing, even though if you look at that you'd think well, it's probably pronounced a little differently.
But, you know, we sometimes leave consonants off.
And so hella could just become hella.
Yeah, people did that with like should have and shoulda.
Exactly, same process.
And you might pronounce it as hella, but still spell it O-F.
And it turns out people were doing that specifically at Berkeley High School.
And we know this again thanks to Internet Archive, because among the many wonders, many treasures that you can find, there are high school yearbooks.
Yeah.
So high school yearbooks have been scanned and digitized around the country.
And Berkeley High School was one of those.
And I think originally the library in Berkeley had a collection of these high school yearbooks that they digitized and then they made those available to Internet archives.
So you could find them there as well.
And so I was looking for hell of, and that's how they were spelling it in the early 1980s in these yearbooks.
And so I started tracing that back a little further, a little further, the 81 yearbook, the 19.
And then I realized that if you're searching on yearbooks, you're searching on the text that's actually printed.
But as we all know, yearbooks have other kinds of text.
When we write in each other's yearbooks when we're high schoolers, we're giving those like inscriptions.
We're actually writing longhand.
And are those digitized too?
Well, yeah.
As it turns out in this case and many others, the yearbooks that end up getting digitized are ones that were sort of previously owned but then end up in the collections of libraries for various reasons.
They may just be... you know, um, how, you know, there are various ways that yearbooks, exactly.
Garage sale, eBay, who knows.
Right.
And so if you're just trying to get yearbooks from a particular school, you may end up with ones that were at some point cast off and then um, and then you can sort of include them, but they have all the writing in them.
And so I saw that was the case for the Berkeley high school yearbooks.
I'm like I gotta, I gotta, you know.
Look to see if people were using hell of or hella earlier than even 1981.
So are those handwritten things, are they, is optical character recognition on those too?
It's not going to help you.
No, no.
I mean it's not.
We're not at the stage where, where we you know that will work for just something.
Like you read them.
I just started skimming through and just seeing what people were writing to each other at that time.
And I got it all the way back to the yearbook for the 1978-79 school year where someone wrote to his friend too bad, you didn't go to Santa Cruz, because it was hell of live.
So hell of live.
Combining two slang terms, live, like it was lively, it was a lot of fun.
And hell of, it was very fun, very exciting.
And you missed out on it.
It was hell of live.
Santa Cruz, represent.
I have lived there.
There you go.
So, yeah.
So I shared this discovery.
I wrote a Wall Street Journal column and also was sharing it on social media because I thought isn't this cool?
And I shared the screenshot from this yearbook, from the 78 79, and asked you know if people could find earlier examples.
And and and so people started sharing my research.
And the wild thing is that someone I knew was from that year at Berkeley High School was an alum, and shared it on Facebook for like the fair Facebook group for that year.
And then someone on that Facebook group said, wait a minute, that...
I'm the one whose yearbook that was.
And like we identified who wrote it and whose yearbook it was.
Wow.
And it turns out that the owner of the yearbook had never even seen this inscription because he had lost it on his graduation day.
He had sort of like gotten everybody to sign it on graduation day and then lost his yearbook.
He blamed his mom like, you know, she was her fault somehow.
But in any case, like he never saw the yearbook or anything that people had written inside it.
And then suddenly on Facebook, people are saying, oh, wait, you're the you're the one.
This is your yearbook because I wrote this to you, even though you never saw it.
So this guy Jim Mannheimer was his name who was the owner of the yearbook like, found out like oh, my yearbook is the one that the library in Berkeley had scanned and now shared with the world.
And so he got in touch with the library and the library said yes.
OK, can you can you prove that this is your yearbook?
And he described it in such a way that it made it clear it was really his.
And so the library agreed to give it back to him because they didn't need it anymore, since they had digitized it.
They had the digital version of it.
And so, 42 years after his high school graduation, he was finally reunited with his yearbook, just because I had been looking into the history of Hella.
So as I like to say, you know, sometimes this research leads in Hella unexpected directions.
And that's one I never would have guessed.
That, you know, just by poking around on this stuff, you know this this guy would end up with his long lost yearbook.
Yeah, that is Hella cool.
I love that.
And you mentioned the Internet Archive where you found the scan.
And we were emailing last night and I discovered another Internet Archive related thing, because a couple of years ago I was in the Oxford English Dictionary looking up the meaning of the word drop to mean to release, like to release a record.
And I saw that the oldest reference was from Spin Magazine, and I wanted to know who had said it.
And so I went to the Internet Archive and was scanning through Spin Magazine.
And you said, I think I didn't have the exact page or something.
Anyway, it took me a while to find it.
I had to read through it.
And I learned it was Run from Run DMC who said it.
That's right.
Got really excited and I felt like he needs to know.
And I made an Instagram reel.
I don't know if he ever saw it.
I don't know still if he knows.
I think he really should know.
It's very cool to be the first reference in the OED for something, even if you're a big, famous rapper.
Anyway, I was telling you about this and it turns out you are the one who found this fan reference.
Yeah, it's funny.
So yeah, so drop in that particular meaning to release something like a record or, you know, these days it gets, you know, a movie can get dropped, or various sort of forms of media that we talk about as either dropping or being dropped.
That's an interesting thing too, that it's got both the transitive usage to release like a record, but then also intransitive to be released.
It has those two different meanings.
And so yeah, I was, I was looking into that history back in.
You know, it was actually 2011 when I was digging into that.
At the time I think I was able to access Spin Magazine, not from Internet Archive, but actually Google Books had Spin Magazine at that point already, you know in a way that you could look through it.
So I think that I was looking for, you know, I figured Spin Magazine was a good place to look.
But then again, that's one where you know you can look for people using the word drop or dropped, and nine times out of 10 or you know more it won't be what you're looking for.
So common.
Meaning of the same word.
And so I probably just got kind of lucky by being like well, it's probably in this time period and probably in this magazine.
And then I found this long article about Run DMC where they're interviewed.
And Run, Reverend Run, I guess we should call him, used Drop in both of these different ways.
And so there's the transitive one where he said I think that I should be able to drop records when I want.
A record called Dedicated, when I first made it, could have dropped that.
So he's using that as the transitive to release a record.
But in that same article, Ron uses it in the other way that we still hear.
He says maybe after my album drops and I'm back on the road and doing what I'm supposed to do in this world, I'll be happy.
Yeah.
And so I shared my discovery on the American Dialect Society mailing list, which I mentioned on the podcast, where people who are like me share their anti-dating finds.
And then eventually, the Oxford English Dictionary updated their entry for drop and included Those examples from Run though, as you say, he's not explicitly given credit.
It just says Spin Magazine.
That's unfortunate because you know, I think he should.
He should get credit for it and be sort of recognized that way by the OED.
Yeah.
So do the dictionaries, do they sort of lurk on those lists?
Is that where they gather the information?
The OED editors are constantly checking out what we're posting there.
And, you know, I'm I've been a longtime informal consultant to the OED.
And so I just check with them sometimes.
We like, you know, pay attention to this thread on the on the mailing list.
There's some good stuff here.
But they have people who are checking it every day to see what people find.
And all of that ends up feeding into their enormous database of citations that they have.
We may not see the anti-datings right away though, because the OED is such a massive operation and they're working on it in such piecemeal fashion.
It may take years before that's reflected in a revision in the online OED at OED.com.
So some of the ones that we talked about, like Scalawag, for instance, I mean I did that, I don't know, 13 years ago.
I was writing about it.
They still haven't updated that entry.
So, sometimes these get into the OED a little faster, but other times you just have to wait.
So, it might not always reflect the latest research on a particular word.
Yeah, I'm going to know in the future, like for Scalawag, I'm not going to just look in the OED.
I'm going to search Scalawag Ben Zimmer and see if it comes up.
I get the earliest date.
That's what I do a lot because I forget the words that I've written about.
I often have to be like, did I write something about this?
I have to Google the word in my name to refresh my memory.
I have the same problem with my work.
But you have talked to some really fun people about words they've coined.
So I hear you got to talk to Stephen Colbert about truthiness.
Yeah no, that's always fun when you can talk to some famous person or you know some entertainer or whatever who's associated with a particular word and talk to them about it.
And so Truthiness is a famous coinage by Stephen Colbert when he was on his original Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, which started in 2005.
And by the end of 2005 the American Dialect Society had decided that that should be their word of the year.
And that was actually the first time I was involved with word of the year for American Dialect Society.
It was very, very exciting for me.
And I've since kind of taken over, overseeing the whole process.
But that was my introduction was like, we're going to make truthiness the word of the year for 2005.
And then Stephen Colbert in his character he was this kind of blowhard conservative guy on the original show started talking about it, about how it was named Word of the Year, but they didn't give him proper credit because the Associated Press article didn't even mention him weirdly.
And so it became this like vendetta that he made up.
People started using that word truthiness.
I mean, it really took off as like, you know, it's not true necessarily, but it's truthy.
It's sort of like it's you know, as long as you feel that it's true, that doesn't matter if it's actually true, which unfortunately has become, you know, increasingly relevant over the past 20 years.
But when it was having its fifth anniversary, I was writing for the New York Times the On Language column, which I took over for a while after William Sapphire passed away.
And so I took the fifth anniversary as an opportunity to get in touch with his people and say hey, I'm writing about the fifth anniversary of Truthiness.
Can I talk to you about your creation?
And he was happy to do it.
He just talked about it.
You know, in terms of happiness, how they came up with it on one of their early shows and then the whole kind of publicity around it after it became named Word of the Year.
And when I told him that I was present at the you know the meeting, you know I was one of the advocates for saying yes, that should be our Word of the Year.
He was like thanking me.
He was thanking me for like, oh, my goodness, like, you know.
Having a word of the year, he was talking to me about how his his wife is an English major.
And, like for her, this is the equivalent of having six back abs, like this very thing that he got word of the year.
And so yeah, it was just this wonderful opportunity to talk to someone who, you know, was obviously very proud of this thing but also kind of bemused at the twists and turns and directions of the word had taken.
Cause you know, once you create a word and put it out into the world, it's no longer yours.
It like gets used and it's out of your control.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think celebrities have a little bit of a better chance of coining a word than the average person probably.
Yeah.
When I had forgotten about, but that you wrote about is toast.
So just say someone is toast as in they're finished.
That that's more recent than, than you might think.
Yeah, yeah.
I think you know toast has been used as a metaphor for being kind of.
You know, something is just done or over.
But to say you're toast like specifically that kind of snappy formulation or this person is toast, to mean they're done, forget it, it's over.
That really just goes back to Ghostbusters, the movie Ghostbusters.
And you know, sometimes if there's a word or a usage that's prominent in a movie, people will say oh, that's clearly been used long before the movie.
And sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not.
You know, the bucket list is one that I've written about that people will always be like oh, I was talking about my bucket list.
Long before the movie The Bucket List happened.
But it turns out, no, you weren't because the screenwriter came up with that.
And I interviewed the screenwriter for a column about that phrase.
And people have claimed to have found earlier examples, but they never pan out from before that movie.
And so Toast is another example like that.
And people.
You know, people may remember the scene where Bill Murray's character says what's the line?
This chick is Toast.
Yeah, this chick is toast.
Right, right.
Or that chick is toast.
Yeah, or yeah, this chick is toast.
Referring to this creature that was played by the model Slavica Jovan, which was the human form of Gozer.
And so she's the one who gets this line directed to her by Bill Murray.
And that apparently just sort of came out of like That improvisation that they were having on set between Bill Murray and Slavica Joven.
And so it was.
If you look in the shooting script it says originally there was, it was going to be a guy.
And the original line was I'm going to turn this guy into toast because they're blasting at it with their like particle streams from their proton packs.
So that morphed into This Chick is Toast.
And that's, you know, became a memorable line in the movie, one that people would quote.
And you can find again lots of examples from when that movie just came out in 1984, where people were picking up on this term from the movie.
And you can find various examples from like college newspapers, some of which are on Internet Archive, of people using toast right when that movie came out, as a way to sort of, you know spread, this funny thing that Bill Murray had said in the movie.
Yeah, because it was so popular at the time.
Yeah.
So we were talking about college newspapers and yearbooks.
And you know there are so many amazing, but you you like talk about some, some amazing places that you do research, especially for things like graffiti.
Yeah, I'm just I'd love to hear more about that.
Yeah.
So the search for unusual words like slang, that might not appear in regular sort of newspapers or other standard sources.
It's often a question for those of us who do this kind of detective work.
Where do you look?
Where do you find it?
And because, again, things could be spread orally before it's written down in some source.
But then there are these other ways that we use language or jot things down.
We talked about high school yearbooks as one of them.
But high school yearbooks are a great place to look for slang.
Graffiti is also a great place to look for slang.
But who holds onto graffiti?
Um, that's the question.
And so there was a researcher named Alan Walker Reed who kind of in 1928 was uh going across the country with his family on a road trip out West.
And he had the idea.
I'm just going to like, at every stop along the way, I'm going to write down the graffiti that I find in the bathroom on the wall uh, wherever the graffiti appeared.
And, uh, He got a lot of really interesting stuff that nobody else was writing down in 1928.
He then, a few years later, had it published, but he couldn't even get it published in the US because it was so bawdy.
Let's say
Lots of obscene terms, lots of four-letter words that no one dared publish because there were obscenity laws.
You could actually get arrested for publishing things like that.
And so he had to get it published in Paris in a limited run.
But he was sort of very careful.
And now they're collector's items.
I'm happy to say I actually have one of the limited run that Alan Walker Reed shared with his fellow linguists and lexicographers.
But it's a treasured collector's item.
So he was doing it back then.
I've looked for other places where people might have collected graffiti.
And one of the most fascinating little archives is at Texas Tech University, where they have a Vietnam archive of material from the Vietnam era.
And among the things they have are canvases that were on bunk beds in these transport ships that took recruits across the Pacific Ocean to Vietnam in the 1960s.
You know, mid to late 60s is when all of this dates from.
And they, you know, they took these canvases that the recruits had been writing on and saved all of them.
And they're well preserved and they've been transcribed very faithfully.
And the stuff that they were writing again, very often obscene, but very often things that you wouldn't find elsewhere because it was you know it was it was not fit for print in newspapers and that sort of thing.
So for someone like me who like, is really interested in in slang and obscene speech and swearing and that sort of thing,
It can be so hard to find it because typically mainstream publications are a little too prim and proper.
Even to this day, the New York Times will dance around various four-letter words, even if they're somehow newsworthy.
But they'll tell you if say, the president says it, then they'll cross the line and actually print it.
So even now, it can be a little hard to track things.
But It's great to be able to find these resources, like those Vietnam era canvases that give us this kind of insight in how are these young men who are being sent off to Vietnam using language in very spicy ways sometimes.
I'm curious who even thought to catalog those.
Is it part of a museum collection or is it part of a library?
Yeah, yeah.
No, they have a whole Vietnam archive.
I'm not sure exactly how these canvases ended up in their collection, but it was basically, I think, when these transport ships were being
And that they you know that they took all of these and they just ended up being like yes, these should, these should go to a museum collection.
And the Texas Tech happened to be the university that was lucky enough to get it.
And so, and thankfully, the curators and librarians there have done a wonderful job in making all of that material accessible to the public.
It's an amazing part of history.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much.
So I guess to finish up, we'll get your book recommendations.
We always do that.
We love to hear the favorite books of our guests.
So what are your three recommendations?
I'd like to recommend three books that are coming out this fall.
Depending on when it airs, they may already be out.
But one of them has a pub date of October 2nd.
So this will probably already be published by the time this airs.
The author is Barry Joseph and he wrote a book called Matching Minds with Sondheim The Puzzles and Games of the Broadway Legend.
And it's published by Bloomsbury.
I was able to read an advanced copy of it that Barry Joseph shared because I have this interest in Stephen Sondheim who you know lovers of Broadway musicals will know his incredible aptitude with songs, language and the wordplay that enters into lyrics of songs and that sort of thing.
But he was also an avid puzzler, including his penchant for cryptic crossword puzzles, this British style of crossword that he helped introduce to American audiences when he was making these puzzles for New York Magazine for a couple of years.
And in his private life, he was surrounded by games and puzzles at all times.
After he passed away, his estate auctioned off his various collection of all sorts of puzzle and game material.
And Barry Joseph, kind of sort of documents, everything that we can learn from his mind, sort of, you know, the puzzling mind of Stephen Sondheim from all of that.
And it's just a lot of fun for fans of Stephen Sondheim or fans of puzzles or both, you know.
Yeah, two different worlds.
That's fascinating.
Yeah.
So there are also a couple of books coming out this fall from friends of mine who, again who I've been able to see advanced copies.
One of them is by Stefan Fatsis, who may be a guest on your podcast at some point.
He is.
He's been a guest talking about the book I think you're going to mention.
Yeah.
So the book is Unabridged, The Thrill of and Threat to the Modern Dictionary.
Pub date is October 14th from Grove Atlantic.
And I've been sort of following Stefan's progress with this book for many years.
It's really taken a long time, but it's really worth it.
And you know it starts from when he was sort of embedded at Merriam-Webster and he got to sort of be in the group that was defining words.
And you get that sort of insider's perspective.
But then... the dictionary industry kind of starts blowing up while he's trying to write this book.
And so it's a really fascinating picture of the state of the dictionary industry, which is pretty precarious these days.
In fact, in the United States Merriam-Webster is kind of the only a publisher still standing in terms of like you know, because you know American Heritage has gone Funk and Wagnall's Random House, the various great dictionary publishers of the past.
And we still have, you know, British publishers like Oxford and Cambridge and so forth.
But we're in this precarious place, especially with the way that people access dictionaries online.
Can you even make money by publishing a dictionary anymore?
That's the question.
And so, so Stefan's book is great for that.
Yeah, I love that book too.
Yeah.
And the final book, and perhaps he could also be a guest on your podcast at some point.
Natan Last, a friend from the crossword world, a very thoughtful writer and great puzzle maker, himself has a book called Across the Universe The Past, Present and Future of the Crossword Puzzle.
Pub date for that is November 25th from Pantheon.
And and Natan has a real flair for writing and does a really fascinating job of presenting sort of crossword culture as it has evolved over the years.
You had me on previously to talk about the crossword craze from 100 years ago, 1924, 25.
I worked with Natan and a few other folks to present some of that material, but he was already working on that for this book, which I'm glad is finally coming out.
But it's not just about that early material.
He talks about sort of the present day crossword culture and how it intersects with technology and art and the various controversies that have gripped the crossword world, and And just a terrific book as well.
So I'm happy to kind of plug my friend's projects, but these are books I think everyone would enjoy.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah no, I'm definitely going to read that book and I'll see about having him on because that sounds fascinating.
Well, Ben, thank you so much.
Ben Zimmer, where can people find you?
On the socials.
You can find me if you look for Ben Zimmer on Blue Sky or Facebook and so forth, as well as benzimmercom.
And again, my crosswords are available in many outlets, including Slate on a regular basis.
Look for my byline there as well.
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We really appreciate it and it really makes a difference.
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So if you want to support the show and get bonus episodes like this right away when they come out and get the new weekly mini crosswords, go to patreoncom slash grammar girl or or look in the show notes for links to get the first month free.
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Thanks for listening.
