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The O.E.D. staff has made what Burchfield dryly refers to as a "bold foray" into English as written or spoken outside the British Isles—the jargon of the U.S. drug culture, hippies and the drag-racing set, for instance. There is even Frisbee, the plastic flying saucer invented by a Los Angeles building inspector who had been inspired by the flight characteristics of pie tins used by the Frisbie bakery in Bridgeport, Conn. Closer to Piccadilly, there is the unlikely British slang word gazoomph. Of uncertain origin, gazoomphing has recently come to mean the practice of suddenly jacking up the price of a piece of British real estate just as the buyer is about to sign the contract.
Piercing Sounds. Although American sources are used, the O.E.D.'s British emphasis sometimes leads to omissions. Bagman, for example, may mean an Australian tramp, as the O.E.D. says, but it is also U.S. slang for one who collects or delivers bribe money, and that definition does not appear in the O.E.D. American-inspired words like Dlsneyesque do. It is attributed to W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who in Journey to War (1939) wrote, "Lady Precious Stream utters some piercing, Disneyesque sounds." Some words prove surprisingly easy to trace. For dymaxion ("yielding the greatest possible efficiency in terms of the available technology"), Burchfield had only to invite R. Buckminster Fuller to lunch. The designer of the Dymaxion House simply related how his business associates devised the word in 1929 as a sort of "word-portrait" of Fuller and his work. Hobbit, which will appear in Volume II, continues to be something of a problem, even though Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is also a friend of Burchfield's. After rejecting the O.E.D.'s proposed etymology as "rotten," Tolkien offered the unacceptable expedient "named by themselves."
Following the changing usage of a word can provide a browser some small sense of continuity in an otherwise disjointed age, even though the O.E.D. does offer a surfeit of arcane words. By some small miracle of coincidence the very last entry in Volume I A-G is also a warning. It is gyver, Australian and New Zealand slang meaning "Affectation of speech or behavior, esp. in phr. to put on the gyver."