We marveled at the way these expressions—the ones we understood, anyway—captured the spirit of the era in which they were defined. It makes sense, for instance, that the Times defined acid (“a slang term for the drug LSD”) in 1970, grunt (“a slang word for an infantryman”) during the Vietnam War, diss (“a slang term for a perceived act of disrespect”) in 1994, and macking (“a slang term for making out”) in 1999.
One particularly memorable example is how the Times‘s unpacked “punk” in 1977: “Slanguist Eric Partridge speculates that punk is hobo lingo to describe very stale bread, perhaps from the French pain. Punk, applied to a person, began as a slang term for a catamite, or boy kept by a pederast, and later extended to cover young hoodlums.”
via The Atlantic
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