What are some unusual types of reading material you use to research words?
I am personally interested in slang, so I look at (or ask our volunteers to look at) a variety of obscure sources that I think might contain unusual vocabulary. We’ve looked at the letters of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs; I recently went through an unpublished collection of student slang collected at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 1970s and ’80s; one of my readers is working on the Yellow Kid, a comic strip that ran at the turn of the century; and we’ve just gone through the autobiographies of the singer Marilyn Manson and the pro wrestler Mick “Mankind” Foley. What inspired you to write The F- Word? Is it because a lot of slang words have sexual connotations? No, not at all, in fact the opposite is true. While almost any nonmedical word for sex would be regarded as “slang,” if you look through carefully compiled slang dictionaries, you’ll see that a relatively small proportion of the material is sexual. I had been involved with a project that devoted a
