Word of the Day: Bumf

via A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

MEANING: Noun: Unwanted or uninteresting printed matter such as governmental forms, legal documents, junk mail, promotional pamphlets, etc.

ETYMOLOGY: Short for bum fodder, slang for toilet paper. Earliest documented use: 1889.

“A mortgage loan can generate 200 pages of bumf, most of it so boring and repetitious that no one has the energy or the time to read it all.”—John Gilmour; Lenders Use The Hoover Principle; The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia); Jan 20, 2001.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang

via cnn

“The publication of Green’s Dictionary of Slang—a product of 17 years of work that make it the largest slang dictionary ever published in English—is for anyone who loves words and likes to laugh.”

Read the rest of the post here.

“The three volumes of Green’s Dictionary of Slang demonstrate the sheer scope of a lifetime of research by Jonathon Green, the leading slang lexicographer of our time. A remarkable collection of this often reviled but endlessly fascinating area of the English language, it covers slang from the past five centuries right up to the present day, from all the different English-speaking countries and regions. Totaling 10.3 million words and over 53,000 entries, the collection provides the definitions of 100,000 words and over 413,000 citations.”

Priced at $450, you can order it here.

Word On The Street: Photos Of People With Words

via npr

“Photographer Richard Nagler writes in his new book, Word On The Street, that in the late '70s, he was wandering the streets of Oakland, Calif., working on another project:

‘I came across an old building ... that had the single word TIME bolted to it in large letters. ... As I looked up, an elderly woman gazed out a window near TIME, but she quickly closed the curtain when, I thought, she saw me across the street with my camera. I was struck by the power of the scene I had just witnessed, and frustrated at not having been able to record it on film.’

Nagler went back to that very spot several times over the next few weeks trying to capture the moment. "The scene evoked in me thoughts of mortality and the relentless passages of time and life. The juxtaposition of the person and the word held a quiet poetic beauty in its pathos and sadness."

Read the rest here, see more on Nagler's website.