You're on your way to Lit Hum and hear "fuck" and "shit" coming out of a classroom down the hall. You check the room, expecting a brawl over Aeneas' ability as a leader or an intense debate over U.S. economic policy, only to find a room full of scholars, students, and even elementary school teachers discussing the history of slang.
On Friday, the Lexicography Society held a discussion featuring Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Madeline Kripke, a Barnard College alumna and the owner of the second largest private collection of dictionaries in the world.
The talk focused on the prudish – and often humorous – approaches dictionaries throughout history have used to define “fuck” and other words associated with sex.
