Status Updates From Verbatim: From the bawdy to...

"Fucktruck 'a van or car in which people engage in sexual activity' had been mentioned in the introduction as being Australian ... a statement rejected by numerous [US] correspondents ... two people noted that the word was also used for 'a bus on which one can meet prospective sexual partners' (both, curiously, referring to a shuttle between Wellesley College and the Harvard and M.I.T. campuses)."(344)vcurious

"... Munç Wang's 'Copulative Sentences in English: A Germanic Language Spoken in Northern Delaware' studies the grammaticality ... of such sentences as 'Micky fucked Michelle's cadaver in the ass' (grammatical), 'Bret fucked the mannikin through the hole he drilled in its throat' (of questionable grammaticality), and 'Fred fucked the log through a hole that squirrels had made (ungrammatical)." (342)

"Fujiyama [British] Phrase.
Acronym for '[Fuck] you, Jack, I'm all right.' Expression of sole concern for self at expense of partner or ally; abandonment, betrayal." (337)

It’s wordy and its meant to be. The subject itself is the English language, specifically the American usage and evolution of it and criticism of that "evolution"…It’s interesting enough to continue reading it.

I am giving this book another read. In the past, I’ve skimmed it and read it in parts (finding which sections of writing interested me most at any given time).

"... we have the story about the ten-year-old who, caving in to the nagging of his ever-suspicious grandmother, admits that his grandfather did indeed let slip a 'dirty' word (shmuck) on their fishing trip, but won't quote it: 'What I can tell you is that it rhymes with [fuck].'" (328)

"The English may not reclaim from the Scots the honor, if such it be, of being the first to put the popular quadriliteral into writing." (323) new favorite term for a four-letter word

"fox obs. in the sense of 'prostitute'; now refers to any eyesome female," (307) EYESOME

"strumpet [Middle English strompet, of obscure origin]." (305) STROMPET

"mopsy [origin unknown] 'a disreputable and slovenly woman,' though earlier a term of endearment; obs. exc. as dialectical British English." (302) is this where Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail come from, Beatrix Potter???

"market-dame 'a harlot of the marketplace; colloquial fr. eighteenth century; increasingly Standard English." (302) standard english? since when? when was this article originally published I guess is a better question

"... Blankies, which seem to be Jumbles sitting around the fire telling stories; and Initialettes, which in an earlier day were called Categories or Guggenheims." (291) well now I have five new word games to look up

"... for 'last straw,' the example was The service in this restaurant has been bad before, but this is the last straw" (286-287)

"One editor on the Random House Dictionary (Unabridged) assigned to writing definitions of idioms and to the contrivance of example contexts had great difficulty in keeping the literal separated from the metaphoric. For 'get in on the ground floor,' she gave the example, He heard they were building a new factory in the area and wanted to get in on the ground floor" (286)

"There is no residency requirement for US Senate other than that candidate be a resident of the state he is running from at the time of his election.' From the Boston Globe, 1 March 1990:23" (278)

"Using the modern alphabet, it has been comparatively easy to create holo-alphabetic sentences of between twenty-nine and thirty-three letters. There's the story of the World War I cryptoanalyst who wrote home requesting, 'Pack my bag with five dozen liquor jugs,'" (276) a true hero