We all know that the New York Times is an institution in American journalism. As such, during the course of its more than 150-year history, the New York Times has had to introduce many new and interesting words to the public in its pages. Some of those words were of course slang and could not be found in a dictionary near you.
With that in mind, the Atlantic has created a neat random generator to educate you on all the slang words the New York Times has had to define from 1851 until now. Just click on the little "Slang Me Another" button, and you will be transported through the ages to discover words and their definitions that have probably never before crossed your own eyes. The slang generator also includes the sentence the word appears in to give you some added context for what you're reading about and helps you imagine the fun that some of the New York Times reporters had in defining these words.
Some of the words just sound funny, such as "honeyfugle," a word that appeared in a story from 1912 that is American slang for 'wheedle' or 'cajole'" and actually appeared in the dictionary. Others are lol-worthy because of the context they were found in, such as this sentence in a 1999 story: "'I don't believe it, it's like you're macking with Jar Jar,' she screeched, using a slang term for making out."
Sometimes, the New York Times seems a little late to the game, such as when it defined the word "bird" as "a slang term for woman" in a 1989 article. However, many readers were probably already familiar with this slang term several years before then, as the British slang word came into popular use in the 1950s and 1960s.
The New York Times story "$25 Penalties for Marijuana Go Into Effect in the Capital" inspired the folks over at the Atlantic to whip up this generator. The story, published July 17, 2014, defines a "jay" as "a slang term for a marijuana cigarette." The Atlantic points out how "delightfully, perfectly Timesian" that description was, and we'd have to agree.
The Atlantic then went out and scoured the New York Times' archives for all of the cases where the phrases "a slang term for," "slang for" and "a slang word for" appear in the paper, which ended up being 73 times in total. Now we just have to see how the New York Times will handle such contemporary slang words as "bae," "basic" and "turnt."
