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Jesse Sheidlower is Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary and author of The F-Word. Recognized as one of the foremost authorities on obscenity in English, he has written about language for a great many publications, including a recent article on Slate. Here, Jesse discusses the criteria for including certain words or obscenities in dictionaries.  Watch the video after the jump.

WARNING: This video contains explicit language.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Power of (Certain) Words...

Sunday morning my son, who is 3-and-a-half, dropped the F-bomb. Yep. Out the F-word came from his innocent little mouth. Twice. Do they still make Lifebouy soap? thought I. Crap--I hope he never says that in front of my mother. Or at preschool.

My husband was witness to this. After a What did you say? to confirm, he asked Murray where he heard That Word. "From you," he said to his dad (AHA! I KNEW IT!), "And my mommy."

Um--I don't think so! It couldn't have been me! I don't say it much. (And if I do, it's more likely I'll say it at the office, and even then, under by breath.) But if not us, then who? He's only got basic cable in his room. All his DVDs are rated G. He hasn't seen our potty-mouthed friend Jerry since summertime. We must be the guilty party. What a proud moment in parenting!

And how do you explain to a kid his age just why that's not a nice word to say? Why can one little word can have so much power? The F-word. Scrotum.

The fact that's it's ALA awards time, along with the fact that my son suddenly curses like a sailor, reminded me of the whole The Higher Power of Lucky/Newbery/scrotum controversy happening around this time last year. Based on my quick BookScan check, Susan Patron's Newbery winner seems to be selling just fine, controversy or not. At home, I haven't gotten Murray to use the s-word when discussing his anatomy, but these days I'm not sure if it would be preferable to the daddy-taught terms he currently uses. I suppose I should go Google Lifebouy. Just in case.

It's official! I couldn't post this when I got it because it hadn't gone through the final approval process, but now it has. Meet the wicked awesome cover for Something Wicked! (Click on the image to see it larger.)

The new cover keeps the same great design from the first book, Something Rotten, while incorporating new faces--Mac and his girlfriend Beth:













And since this is based on "the Scottish play" and set at a Scottish Highland Festival, we also get that great tartan blue! (A Macduff tartan? I'll have to check.) Love the way the blue tartan becomes the mountain sky on the back cover too. Genius! This one takes place on a mountaintop near Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee--hence the picturesque backdrop this time.

In lieu of the little skull on Something Rotten's cover we get a new icon here too--a sgian dubh, or short Scottish dagger. Wait, this means I'll have to get a new stamp made! I'm going to have to buy one of those carousels bookkeepers use to hold all their check stamps.

I'm totally thrilled with this cover, and the whole look of the series. Special thanks to editor Liz and cover designer Emilian Gregory for making it happen!

Alan here, posting from the road as I visit five Birmingham-area schools in five days to talk about Samurai Shortstop and Something Rotten. The horrible truth: I do not have Bravo in my motel room! (Checking the channel lineup card was among the first things I did when I arrived late Sunday night.) I am faced with three options: read the continual updates on Blogging Project Runway without seeing what's really happening; miss the show and watch when I get home the tape Wendi is making of it; or go to someplace like Mellow Mushroom and ask them to switch over a basketball game to Project Runway, which ought to go over really well. There is always a fourth option, too--I'm putting out the call for Birmingham-area PR fans! Anybody got a Project Runway party I can crash!? I am recently bathed and reasonably well-kempt, and will not talk until the commercial breaks. Throw me a frickin' rope here, people!

Now on to why I'm blogging tonight when I should be working on the edits for Something Wicked. Wendi and I stopped by Steve and Barry's in Asheville on the way home from Thanksgiving at her parents' house so we could check out the winning Victorya/Kevin design on sale. Other bloggers have reported the photo police chasing them from the store, but we were lucky enough to snap some shots without anyone noticing. In fact, there were so few employees at this mall-anchor-store-sized-Steve and Barry's that we felt as though we could have walked right out the back door with armfuls of merchandise and no one would have noticed. Luckily we are made of starcher moral fiber. That and we didn't find much we wanted to steal . . .

So here's the dress:

Click on the image to see it larger. As promised, the price was a whopping $19.98:

The dress came in black and burgundy, and we, like other bloggers, liked the burgundy better. Which begs the question--why were so many of last week's designers afraid of using color? The burgundy is a far cry from the teal blue we got from Elisa/P and Christian/Carmen. I suppose it was closer to the red Ricky/Jack used, but still--bring on the color! I hope this week the designers get to let it all loose . . . although signs point to no. I'll have a preview soon that collects some of the speculation for this week's challenge. Which I cannot watch. Did I mention I don't have Bravo in my motel room?

For the sake of completism, here is the top of the outfit:

Neither of us tried the outfit on (though I was sorely tempted) but it was fun to have it promised in the store and then be able to drop by that weekend and actually see it on the shelf. It was certainly a real kudo for Victorya to have her design in a mass market retailer. I hope she and her family and friends had a little "let's go shopping party" to enjoy it. I know when I have a book hit the shelves I go around to as many bookstores as possible to bask in the glow . . .

Well, at least the first submission draft is. Officially sold in March and researched, outlined, written and edited by the end of July. What is that - a little over four months? Whew. I feel like I've just sprinted a mile. It's a bit bigger than Something Rotten too - by around fifty pages. How I managed to turn Shakespeare's longest play (Hamlet) into a 200 page manuscript and his shortest tragedy (Macbeth) into 250 manuscript pages is a mystery perhaps not even Horatio could solve.

I also beat my own self-imposed deadline of the end of August. Why push it? Well, not to brown-nose - although the nerd in me does enjoy turning in papers early - but instead to give me more time on the Brooklyn Nine rewrite. A bit of work there, as it's going from nine different first-person voices to a consistent third person narration. I'm also reworking the overall story arc so that there is an overall story arc. (This will make more sense when you can read it. And I certainly hope it makes more sense to me before that.)

Along with the first draft of Something Wicked, I also sent editor Liz a pitch for Horatio Wilkes mystery #3: Something Foolish. This one would be based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, if you hadn't already guessed - from Puck's "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" (Although I had a suggestion from another editor at ALA to call it What the Puck?) Kind of tricky to take a comedy and make it a tragedy, but I have a plan. In many ways Midsummer would be the perfect follow up to where Wicked leaves off, but we'll see. If it's not Midsummer, it will probably be Julius Caesar (Horatio on a college visit to a frat house - think "toga party") or The Tempest (Horatio as an intern at a Disney-esque theme park). That's assuming they want a third book at all!

Here's hoping. I do so love writing these, and Shakespeare does have a few more plays left . . .

It was a big day here yesterday at Gratz HQ, as ground was finally broken on our new live-work complex. We would have blogged about it that night, but, well . . . you'll see.

First those massive tree stumps needed to be uprooted. The backhoe made quick work of them.


There they are. I think it would be hysterical to make one of those chainsaw carvings out of these guys, keeping the tentacles and making the top look like the head of Cthulhu. Now THAT would be some scary chainsaw art.

The backhoe was also able to neatly stack up all the massive logs left over from the great felling. Hooray for pneumatics! Since these are both pines they're not good for fireplaces, so they shall not be burned. Instead, we plan to use them in our landscaping, turning the largest of them into benches. (Or, rather, logs you sit on like benches.) How we will move them again without the backhoe will remain a mystery not unlike how the ancient Egyptians built the Pyramids - even to us.

Once that work was finished, our septic tank had to be uncovered so the health inspector could verify that it will be in good working order for the new house. Finding the septic tank took a fair bit of digging however . . .

And five massive holes in the ground later, the guys finally found it. You can't even see it here - they've just found the beginning of it there in the corner of that crater. See? I knew there was a reason I never bothered to mow our yard.

After lunch, the guys got busy on the foundation. Today's mission: dig the trenches that will become the "footings" of the foundation. At each step of the way the trenches were measured to make sure they were level. What you can't see in this picture is Kenny off to the side with surveying equipment, measuring the grade. I took this picture from my office, where I was hard at work watching Marvin and his crew work writing two chapters of Something Wicked.

Here's what it looked like when they were finished:


You can see a smaller square cut into the larger one - this is where our bottom-floor screened-in porch will be. The exterior walls of the house form a hollow L shape behind this space, and I think they have to pour special footings any time they have load bearing walls. Hence the secondary digging.

Sparks flew - right beneath my window! - when the backhoe found our power lines. Luckily none of them got snapped. Our phone line, however, was not so lucky:

We lost our land line and our internet, of course, which was worse. BellSouth was thankfully prompt, and had us back up and running by mid-morning today. Our tech - Jamie, whom we're getting to know too well! - didn't bother repairing the underground line, and instead ran us a loooong phone line form the pole to the other side of the house, bypassing the work site entirely. When the new house is built we can shorten and hide the line again.

Progress Energy didn't prove to be as fast, so we're doubly lucky that line wasn't snapped. We got put on the work order list to have our line foundation bypassed by an underground splice, but we're told it won't be for another couple of weeks. Marvin tells us that won't pose too much of an impediment, but we'll see.

At the end of the day, this is what we had. That night we had a gullywasher of a rain storm, but the foundation trenches didn't seem to suffer too badly. The guys didn't work today due to the downpour overnight, but Josh and Kenny came out to make sure all was well and deliver some long pieces of rebar. We'll have to wait and see what they do with that tomorrow! I'll certainly enjoy watching from that window right there at the end of the house while I'm supposed to be working.

While all this construction was going on, Jo played with Marvin's two grandkids (both sons of Josh I think, the backhoe operator) by capturing a variety of bugs and small creatures around the yard. In addition to finding a very cool snake egg in the upturned dirt in the backyard, they managed to find - and snare - a pretty big black widow spider:

We always tell Jo that spiders are our friends, but, well, this one isn't.

Tune in tomorrow to see what new developments - and creatures - we have to report.

A quality writing day, if not a quantity writing day. I've abandoned hope of completing the manuscript by Friday, mostly because I see more time-eating tasks on the horizon: like the possibility of having to walk all the way BACK to the service station to pick up my car tomorrow. I may have a ride, but it depends on his schedule. I had hoped to go into Asheville tomorrow night to get a pizza and play trivia (I came in second among eleven teams the last time I was home alone and earned a $30.00 gift certificate!) but that plan will be scrapped if it means walking two hours to pick up the car. I love Mellow Mushroom pizza (and those who know me know what an understatement that is) but I don't think I would walk two hours and drive another two hours there and back for one.

We also have the tree guy coming tomorrow. Regrettably, a couple of trees have to be taken down to make way for our new house - but fear not! We'll plant far more than we cut down on this lot. I also still have to sign a contract and get our blueprints okayed by a building inspector, which I ALSO hoped to do tomorrow.

Did I mention I wanted to actually do some writing tomorrow too?

Okay, here are your daily lotto numbers:

Days home alone: 3

Chapters written: 4

Pages written: 30

Wii baseball: Within 200 points of pro

Wii bowling: Bowled four games; maintained pro status

Wii tennis: Still pretty hopeless

Wii golf: Shot another 3 under; maintained pro status

Mellow Mushroom pizzas eaten: Still just 1

Miles walked: Still just 5, thank goodness

In a day interrupted by a trip to Asheville and then a very long walk home, I managed to write one chapter of eight pages. Unfortunately, I realized that I've been miscounting the number of chapters I have left to write - I had eleven left to write when the week began, not ten, so I've got three down and now eight still to go. Not sure I can make that by the week's end . . .

Here then are the new totals:

Days home alone: 2

Chapters written: 3

Pages written: 22

Wii: No change

Mellow Mushroom pizzas eaten: 1

Miles walked: 5

Wendi and Jo are on the road this week, which means I'm home alone. I spent most of the day Sunday using violent pratfall traps to ward off two inept bandits who were trying to rob our home, but I did manage to squeeze in some writing time and some Wii time. Here are the totals:

Days home alone: 1

Chapters written: 2

Pages written: 14

Wii golf high score: -3 on nine holes!

Home run challenge: 10 in a row

Mellow Mushroom pizzas eaten: 0

As you can see, I hit two personal bests yesterday - 14 pages written, which may be some kind of a record for me, and 3 under on golf, which is certainly a record, as my previous best on my own Wii was 2 over. I also discovered that our Wii is wireless! It picked up our in-house wireless internet connection, which is totally cool. I have yet to discover how to play others online, but I will. In the meantime I went to the Wii shop just for kicks, and learned you can buy and download old NES and Super Nintendo games. Oh mother of Mario, if they ever offer Super Dodge Ball I will never leave the house again. Why oh why did I ever get rid of my old Nintendo Entertainment System? Perhaps I knew that someday the Wii would let me re-live my former NES glory. Or maybe I just couldn't keep a fifth game system hooked to my television . . .

So today may prove a busy one. I'm expecting a call from our builder, telling me the contract for building our home is ready to sign. Then I need to collect a copy of our blueprints and go down to the building inspector's office to get a building permit. Why the rush? Construction on our new house is due to begin this week. Then later this afternoon I need to run down to Asheville to deliver Wendi's pinafore project to Lark Books. I think I'll also eat a Mellow Mushroom pizza while in town. You know, to be different.

But I've gotten up at what is for me a decent hour, and now I'm going to get busy so when the distractions come I'll already have some writing out of the way. I don't know if this is going to be a two chapter day or not, but that would be nice. I always look ahead at the chapter I have to write the next day, so I sort of wake up thinking about what's to come, and today should be a fun one. Horatio will confront a suspect, learn he's got the wrong guy, and then have a revealing chat with his mysterious ally, General Sternwood. (Fans of Chandler will recognize that name, borrowed from The Big Sleep.)

Those who know me as a writer know I outline everything before I write it, which allows me to look ahead like this. I wonder if other authors who outline do the same thing. I get excited when I know I've got a good chapter coming. As I go off to my office I'll tell Wendi - "I have to go kill someone today," or "today's the day Horatio gets the snot beat out of him." I kind of like thinking about it that way - enjoying the events as they unfold. Maybe authors who don't outline get that same sort of feeling after the chapter has been finished, like "Oh, today was fun - I ran over my main character with a golf cart!" But I've always been a pizza-is-half-eaten kind of guy. I'll take a whole pizza staring me in the face over a half-consumed one any day.

Wendi and Jo are gone for an unprecedented second trip to her parents', and I'm once again home alone. This is very good timing, as I'm exactly ten chapters away from finishing the first draft of Something Wicked - and I have an ambitious Friday finish in my sights.

So what was the first order of business? Playing the Wii, of course. Although I should note that I am no longer playing my friend Paul's Wii. I'm now playing with my own Wii. (I know, I know. But please, let's keep this clean - this is a family blog after all.)

The story of how we actually FOUND a Wii to purchase is one perhaps best saved for a later blog - or over a game of MarioParty 8 - but I will say that when I finally found a place that said they had two in stock they only had one left by the time Jo, my Dad and I got there fifteen minutes later - with another two callers supposedly on the way trying to beat us there. Had the second been there we would have bought it for Wendi's sister Niki, who actually has scouts around the United States on the lookout for a Wii of her own.

So, after one week of owning our own Wii (and having to start all over at establishing records and benchmarks) I've yet to improve upon my Paul's Wii best in golf (par for a nine hole course). I have nonetheless practiced and progressed far enough to be rated as a "Pro" golfer on the system. So I always have a career on the Wii PGA circuit to fall back on if the writing career doesn't pan out, I guess. I've also become a "Pro" level bowler - and I've managed to blow my old Paul's Wii high score out of the water with a 268. (Which I hit today.) I attribute that success to the Guide to Natural Bowling book I picked up in Spruce Pine, North Carolina a couple of months back. To my chagrin though, I've been unable to reach "Pro" level in baseball - my favorite sport. I'm getting close, but the computer opponent really gets tough on you when you get better, and I don't know any other way to combat him. Perhaps I'll have to buy a hint book. Which will of course cement my status as loser supreme.

So, um, back to the novel - which I really am eager to get back to. We just spent all day yesterday at the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games in Linville, North Carolina, which was the original inspiration for the setting for Something Wicked. I was recharged and re-invigorated - and came up with nice tweaks to a couple of scenes I had already planned. We also purchased four CDs from great bands we heard - Albannach, BarleyJuice, and Mother Grove, all of which I'll be listening to as I finish the book. I hope to mention one or two of them in the context of the book too.

All right - I've played the Wii and I've blogged to begin my Home Alone sequel, so I'm off to write. Writing updates to follow -

Wendi and Jo are back home now. Here are the totals for the week:

Chapters written: 6.5

Pages written: 54

Average pages per day: 9

Bowling high score: No improvement

Home runs hit in a row: No improvement

Best nine holes of golf: No improvement

Episodes of Doctor Who watched: 7

Mellow Mushroom pizzas eaten: 2

As you can see, I made much better progress on Something Wicked and Doctor Who than I did on the Wii. That wasn't for lack of playing - but I may have hit my Wii Sports ceiling. Once you peak, you can actually earn negative points for underperforming. Getting to pro level is actually more difficult than I had ever imagined - but I shall persist.

And I . . . guess I'll finish this book too.

Nine pages a day is better than my usual average, which is around 5-7. I had hoped to finish more chapters - get further into my outline - but the last chapter I worked on turned out to be 14 pages, which was far more than I expected! That's longer than I generally like chapters to go, so I may look at breaking it into parts when I go back through for the first major edit. It was a difficult chapter to write too - it's a pivotal moment in the story, and I had to get it just right. It'll take more work when I get to the next round, but for now it's on paper (well, on screen) and I'm happy enough to push on.

It was a productive week, but I'm glad my peeps are home . . .

Wendi and Jo are at Wendi's parents' for the week, which means I home alone to write.

And play Wii.

Here are my totals so far:

Chapters written: 3.5

Pages written: 28

Bowling high score: 207

Home runs hit in a row: 10

Best nine holes of golf: Par

Episodes of Doctor Who watched: 4

Mellow Mushroom pizzas eaten: 1