Deb, this wikipedia dictionary tells where a slang word is most often used:

[link]

And this one looks like it might be helpful: [link]

Oh, man. BLESS, Deena! All the way useful.

I keep telling myself this shouldn't be any trickier than medieval French slang. Right? Right.

Hmm. Y'know what might work, if you need more than you already have. Arrange for yourself a time-line of hit songs by years for the years you were interested in. Then google the lyrics of songs for each year. Presto: you have instant examples of what slang was being used what year. Of course, as you pointed out this is fiction. If you get some 2000 slang in 1995 - hey maybe the character invented the term and it only became popular later.

No. Because the problem is inverted. I know the description of something; what I need is to find the term for it.

So if I want to say a character - a girl, kid who grew up with the protagonist, nice kid but a little simple, easy to take advantage of - how the hell would I figure out where to look? If the protagonist is describing her, how do I find that term in the vernacular?

I was wrong. Medieval French is WAY easier.

Medieval French also has fewer people who can call you out on it--but concomitantly fewer who can help you.

Medieval French also has fewer people who can call you out on it

Yeah, and the one person out there with a bug up her ass managed to to do that after FFoSM came out - by writing to my editor, not me.

Never mind that of the three people who proofed and double-proofed it for me, two are native French speakers (one from France, one from Switzerland on the Swiss side of the Haute Savoy), and one (my sister) is a PhD in French, with a medieval speciality.

Ha. This is why I can never write anything, ever, because I'm too lazy to do enough research that would satisfy even the most casual Buffista, let alone the wild worlds of pedantic critics. Or I can write only in entirely built worlds.

But Liese, even entirely-built worlds have to have interior, structural and linguistic consistency.

This chick who wrote to Ruth Cavin - she also complained daintily because I hadn't written huge sections of it in authentic Middle English. She was delightfully helpful, including a livelink to "an academic site that will provide you with the grammatical structure you will need in future books."

She signed it with "PhD" in bold. I mentally translated that to "Please-hangyourself-Darling."

Right. Force my readers - most of whom, gasp shock horror, are actually reading the book because they want to see what HAPPENS in the course of the story - to stop in mid-plot, hunt up a Chaucerian English lexicon, and translate every word I've written. Drop a boat anchor in the middle of the story.

Oh, yeah, honey. My editor's allllllll over that. We'll get on it right away.

I had a certain amount of enjoyment in crafting the response my editor talked me out of sending, which finished up with polite surprise that she had voiced her concerns to my editor, rather than to the author, which, last time I looked, was the appropriate and generally accepted procedure in academia.

Dumbass.

Deb, this might help... The Hip Hoptionary.

One of my favorite reference books when I worked at the music library.

Heh. This is true.

But Liese, even entirely-built worlds have to have interior, structural and linguistic consistency.

I was going to pipe up and say that at least current speakers of my entirely-built language wouldn't pop up to complain about it. But then I thought about Klingon and all the Elvish-speaking folks and decided that no, you're right.