Grammar girl here, this week guest writer David Skinner, author of The Story of Ain't,

is going to help us understand what those labels, such as slang and non-standard mean

in dictionaries, and he'll share the amazing story of why changing some of those labels

caused a huge uproar when Merriam Webster released a new version of their dictionary.

Do you ever have the feeling that words should come with warning labels?

Well, in most dictionaries, they do.

In the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, published in 2011, tummy is labeled

informal and described as baby talk.

It's hard to imagine a native speaker not already knowing this, but there it is.

The information you need to avoid telling your boss that you're staying home because

you have a boo-boo in your tummy whammy.

Another term dictionaries use to mark off joky or trouble-making words is slang.

Merriam Webster online says that words labeled slang, quote, are especially appropriate

in context of extreme informality, and are composed typically of shortened or altered

forms, or extravagant or facetious figures of speech, unquote.

Merriam Webster gives the example of barb, the slang abbreviation a barbicuit, but then

says that slang can sometimes be very hard to identify.

According to these dictionary-makers, quote, there's no satisfactory objective test

for slang, especially when reference to a word is out of context.

No word, in fact, is invariably slang, and many standard words can be given slang applications,

unquote.

So, sometimes slang words are not slang, and sometimes standard words are, yes, according

...