1145. In this bonus segment from October, I talk with Ben Zimmer about "hella" and how even yearbook messages can be digitized to help preserve the language record. Ben shares the full story of this slang term, and we also talk about the detective work that led to the OED using Run DMC's use of "drop" in “Spin Magazine” as a citation.
1145. In this bonus segment from October, I talk with Ben Zimmer about "hella" and how even yearbook messages can be digitized to help preserve the language record. Ben shares the full story of this slang term, and we also talk about the detective work that led to the OED using Run DMC's use of "drop" in “Spin Magazine” as a citation.
Ben Zimmer's website: Benzimmer.com
Ben Zimmer's social media: Bluesky. Facebook.
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Mignon: 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.
[Computer-generated transcript.]
Mignon Fogarty: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. 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.
Ben Zimmer: Hello. Glad to extend the conversation.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, it's so much fun. So, you know, I'm a West Coast girl and I am familiar with the bitchin’ wicked dichotomy between the West Coast. But, you have found out interesting things about the word "hella," which, you know, to me is a word from the nineties, but it goes back much farther than that. And so, like, tell us the story of “hella.”
Ben Zimmer: 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, that it's this thing that developed, you know, 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 it was, you know, the earliest examples that were found weren't even from the Bay Area. You know, the OED for a while had as their earliest citation something from the “Toronto Star,” I think, you know, a Toronto newspaper. It's like, that's, you know, 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, you know, 1987 is what the OED had. 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 seventies, early eighties or whatever,” everybody was like, “Yeah, no, it went back much further than that.” But it was a question of where to look. And so I just, you know, started finding like earlier and earlier examples like, you know, 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 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 archive.org, 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's 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 Nezpa or Neppa, 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, you know, "Until next time with the bits and pieces, take the time to find out about someone. You just might be ‘hella surprised.’" He put "hella surprised" in quotation marks because probably, you know, it wasn't even a known expression for everyone in the Bay Area at that time. It was maybe really localized to, you know, 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 eighties.
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 "hell of" could just become "hella."
Mignon Fogarty: People say like "should have" and "shoulda."
Ben Zimmer: 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 the Internet Archive because among their many wonders, many treasures that you can find, there are high school yearbooks. 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, the '81 yearbook, the 19... and then, I realized that if you're searching on yearbooks, you could... 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 inscriptions, we're actually writing longhand.
Mignon Fogarty: And are those digitized too?
Ben Zimmer: 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, there are various ways that yearbooks may—exactly like a 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 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, you know, look to see if people were using "hell of" or "hella" earlier than even 1981. And then I...
Mignon Fogarty: So, those hand written things, is optical character recognition on those too?
Ben Zimmer: It's not gonna help you. No, I mean, it's not—we're not at the stage where that will work for just something that.
Mignon Fogarty: You read them.
Ben Zimmer: 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 '78-'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.
Mignon Fogarty: Santa Cruz represent. I have lived there.
Ben Zimmer: There you go. So yeah, 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? Like, you can—and I shared the screenshot from this yearbook from the '78-'79. And you know, I asked if people could find earlier examples, and so people started sharing my research. And the wild thing is that someone I knew from that year at Berkeley High School was an alum and shared it on Facebook for like the Facebook group for that year. And then someone on that Facebook group said, "Wait a minute, I'm the one whose yearbook that was." And like, we identified who wrote it and whose yearbook it was.
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 gotten everybody to sign it on graduation day and then lost his yearbook. He blamed his mom, like, you know, it was her fault somehow. But in any case, 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 one. This is your yearbook, because I wrote this to you even though you never saw it.” And so this guy, Jim Manheimer was his name, who was the owner of the yearbook, like found out, "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, "Okay, can you prove that this is your yearbook?" And he described it, you know, 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 guy would end up with his long-lost yearbook.
Mignon Fogarty: 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 like 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.
Ben Zimmer: That's right.
Mignon Fogarty: And I 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 reference!
Ben Zimmer: Yeah, it was me. 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. There are all 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 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 ten, or you know, more, it won't be what you're looking for. It'll be another 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 is using that as the transitive to release a record. But in that same article, Run 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."
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 antedating 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 get credit for it and be sort of recognized that way by the OED.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. So did the dictionaries, do they sort of lurk on those lists? Is that where they get their information?
Ben Zimmer: Yeah, no, the OED editors are constantly checking out what we're posting there. And, you know, I’ve been a longtime informal consultant to the OED, and so I just check with them sometimes, be like, you know, pay attention to this thread 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 antedatings right away, though, because the OED is such a massive operation and working on it in such a 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 "scallawag," 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.
Mignon Fogarty: I'm gonna know in the future, like for "scallawag," I'm not gonna just look in the OED, I'm gonna search "scallawag, Ben Zimmer," and if it comes up, I get the earliest date.
Ben Zimmer: That's funny. 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.
Mignon Fogarty: I have the same problem with my work. But you have talked to really fun people about words they've coined. So I hear you got to talk to Stephen Colbert about "truthiness."
Ben Zimmer: 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 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 exciting for me. And I've since kind of taken over, you know, overseeing the whole process. But that was my introduction: we’re gonna 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 vendetta that he made up, but then 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, 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 Safire 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, you know, talked about it in terms of 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 meeting, you know, I was one of the advocates for saying, "Yes, it should be a 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 wife is an English major and like for her, this is the equivalent of having six-pack abs, like this very sexy 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 the directions the word had taken. Because, you know, once you create a word and put it out into the world, it's no longer yours. It gets used, and it's out of your control.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. I think celebrities have a little bit of a better chance of coining a word than the average person probably. Yeah. One I had forgotten about, but that you wrote about is "toast." So just say someone is "toast," as in they're finished—that's more recent than you might think.
Ben Zimmer: 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, "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,’" 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, may remember the scene where Bill Murray's character says, what's the line? “This chick is toast." Right, right.
Mignon Fogarty: “This chick is toast,” or “That chick is toast.”
Ben Zimmer: Yeah. Or, "Yeah, this chick is toast," referring to this creature that was played by the model Slavitza Jovin, 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 improvisation that they were having on set between Bill Murray and Slavitza Jovin. And so, if you look in the shooting script, it says originally it was gonna be a guy and the original line was, "I'm gonna turn this guy into toast," because they're blasting at it with their particle streams from their proton packs. So that morphed into "this chick's toast." And that's, you know, became a memorable line in the movie, one that people would quote. And, you know, 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 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.
Mignon Fogarty: 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 have like, talk about some amazing places that you do research, especially for things like graffiti. I just love to hear more about that.
Ben Zimmer: Yeah. So, the search for unusual words like slang that might not appear in regular sort of, you know, 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 they're 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? That's the question.
And so, there was a researcher named Alan Walker Reed who, kind of in 1928, was going across the country with his family on a road trip out west, and he had the idea. I'm just gonna, like, at every stop along the way, I'm gonna write down the graffiti that I find in the bathroom, on the wall, wherever the graffiti appeared. And he got a lot of really interesting stuff that nobody else was writing down in 1928. He then, like, you know, a few years later, had it published, but he couldn't even get it published in the U.S. 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 runs that Alan Walker Reed shared with his fellow linguists and lexicographers, but they're, 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 sixties 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 not fit for print in newspapers and that sort of thing.
So for someone like me who is really interested in slang and obscene, you know, 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, you know, 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 these young men who are being sent off to Vietnam are using language in very spicy ways sometimes.
Mignon Fogarty: I'm curious who even thought to catalog those. Is it part of a museum collection or is it part of a library?
Ben Zimmer: 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 decommissioned, that they took all of these and they just ended up being like, yes, these should go to a museum collection. And Texas Tech happened to be the university that was lucky enough to get it. And thankfully the curators and librarians there have done a wonderful job in making all of that material accessible to the public.
Mignon Fogarty: That’s an amazing part of history. Well, thank you so much. So I guess to finish up, get your book recommendations because we always do that. We love to hear the favorite books of our guests. So what are your three recommendations?
Ben Zimmer: I'd like to recommend three books that are coming out this fall; depending on when this airs, they may already be out. But one of them has a pub date of October 2nd.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay.
Ben Zimmer: 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 language and the wordplay that enters into the 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. 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 documents everything that we can learn from his mind, this 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.
Mignon Fogarty: Two different worlds. That's fascinating.
Ben Zimmer: So there are also a couple of books coming out this fall from friends of mine who, again, I've been able to see advanced copies. One of them is by Stephan Fatsis, who may be a guest on your podcast at some point.
Mignon Fogarty: He is, he’s been a guest talking about the book I think you're gonna mention.
Ben Zimmer: Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Ben Zimmer: Yes. 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, you know, 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 is 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 publisher still standing in terms of like, you know, because American Heritage has gone and Funk and Wagnalls, Random House, so 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, Stefan's book is great for that.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. I love that book too. Yeah.
Ben Zimmer: Yeah. And the final book, and, you know, 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.” The pub date for that is November 25th from Pantheon.
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 a hundred years ago from a hundred years ago, 1924-1925. 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 the present-day crossword culture and how it intersects with technology and art and the various controversies that have gripped the crossword world. It's just a terrific book as well. So, I'm happy to kind of plug my friends' projects, but these are books I think everyone would enjoy.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, no, I'm definitely gonna read that book and I'll see about having him on because that sounds fascinating. Well, Ben, thank you so much. Ben Zimmer, can people find you?
Ben Zimmer: On the socials, you can find me if you look for Ben Zimmer on Blue Sky, Facebook, and so forth, as well as benzimmer.com. And again, my crosswords are available in many outlets, including “Slate” on a regular basis. So look for my byline there as well.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. We'll put links in the show notes. Thank you to the Grammarpaloozians for supporting the show so we can have bonus episodes like this. We really appreciate it. It really makes a difference. And if you want to be a supporter, go to quickanddirtytips.com/bonus. That’s all. Thanks for listening.
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