Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Professor Maciej Widawski of the Department of English Linguistics at WSB University in Gdańsk, a fellow sociolinguist and lexicographer, for his tremendous support for the project; his books on slang have been an inspiration for me since my undergraduate studies, and I have been lucky to work with him on several scholarly projects. I also wish to thank several people who have been helpful to and supportive of me in my academic endeavors, including this work: Professor John Rickford of the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University; Professor Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld of the Institute of English at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow; Professors Jillian Castillo-Speed and Wei Chi Poon of the Department of Ethnic Studies Library at the University of California–Berkeley; Director Leilani Freund of George Smathers Library at the University of Florida in Gainesville; Director Pamela Gillespie of Morris Cohen Library at the City University of New York; Associate University Librarians Dani Brecher Cook and Tamara Rhodes of Theodor Geisel Library at the University of California–San Diego, and Visiting Scholars Advisor Belén Flores of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California–Berkeley. At Cambridge University Press, I would like to thank Senior Commissioning Editor Helen Barton, and Professor Merja Kytö, editor of the Studies in English Language series, for their generous support and continued interest in my project resulting in the publication of this book; Rachel Goodyear for her superb copyediting; and Isabel Collins, Stephanie Taylor, and Reshma Xavier for their excellent management of the production of the book.

The lexical material used in this book was verified and expanded using library resources at the following academic institutions: Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ), City University of New York (New York, NY), Columbia University (New York, NY), Florida State University (Tallahassee, FL), Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), Princeton University (Princeton, NJ), San Francisco State University (San Francisco, CA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, BC), Stanford University (Stanford, CA), Tulane University (New Orleans, LA), University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa, AL), University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), University of California (Berkeley, CA), University of California (Los Angeles, CA), University of California (San Diego, CA), University of California (Santa Barbara, CA), University of Florida (Gainesville, FL), University of Miami (Coral Gables, FL), University of Mississippi (Oxford, MS), University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM), University of North Florida (Jacksonville, FL), University of Ottawa (Ottawa, ON), University of Washington (Seattle, WA), University of Wisconsin (Madison, WI), and Yale University (New Haven, CT) as well as New York Public Library (New York, NY) and the Library of Congress (Washington, DC). Due acknowledgment is given.