Year in and year out, frightened hordes of people, popularly known as freshman, enter colleges and universities throughout the United States. These people are unsure about many aspects of their new schools and residence, and are also dubious about whether or not they will always comprehend the local lingo. For each and every school has its own unique way of speech. The theory of a local language is applicable even if the university embodies students from all parts of the globe because there will always be words that are used at, or true to, only that school. This local jargon often greatly confuse neoteric students and it is for this reason that we at Cornell have decided to compile a small Dictionary of Local Usage, containing words that apply to and are daily used at our school. The aim of this dictionary is to aid beginning students in their adaptation to the school by clearly explaining certain terms to them.

Students attending this school use a myriad of words that many students have never heard of before entering Ithaca. One can partly attribute this phenomenon to the location of the school. Some of these local terms are ones used only in the North Eastern region of America, and hence students from abroad or the West would not comprehend them. After our survey of local speech to locate candidates for entries into our dictionary, we decided to include these regional terms in it because some students from other parts of the United States might have difficulty in understanding speech that included these terms. Also, we decided to include certain colloquialisms that are not restricted to the Cornell campus, but rather, are widespread throughout the country for the simple reason that some foreign students might find them troublesome. Since these regional and national colloquialisms abound in everyday speech, we resolved to restrict ourselves to the terms that students would find the most perplexing.

The limit of these colloquial entries that we placed upon ourselves did not extend to entries of the local names for places and buildings around the Cornell campus. We did not set boundaries for these terms because we realize their great importance. The correct and proper names are the ones people find on official maps of Cornell, however, they are not what students and faculty use in everyday conversation. In such cases, a new student would be completely lost and would not understand because all he has learned are the proper names. When he asks for directions, his guides might not use the original names bestowed upon places and might revert to the common titles. Once again, the beginning student would suffer great confusion. For whereas some popular names are rather similar to its original ones, as in the case of "The Straight" and its proper appellation of "Willard Straight Hall", this is not always true. For example, some might not be able to connect "Big Dick" to "Clara Dickson Hall". It is due to this high level of confusion that might result among freshman and others who are new to the area that we compiled such a detailed list of jargon terms for local places and buildings.

The same reasons led us to include several distinguished individuals among campus whom people actually do weave into ordinary conversation. One such person is Chef Wang, a Chinese cook who prepares students stir-fry at one of the traditional dining halls on campus. As his food is celebrated across campus because its appetizing qualities, many students will tend to recommend him to newcomers and it is crucial to familiarize them with his name through the dictionary. It is important to inform incoming students and faculty about the better food deals found around campus so that they will not completely starve themselves during the first few weeks of school.

New students do not know what many of the names of events and social activities represent and so we have also endeavored to include most of the terms of traditional events and those that revolve around students' social lives. We concluded that students could not attend Cornell without being apprised of the meaning of such events as the annual Slope Day and Dragon Day. If we did not explain the tradition and legend behind these events, students would understand the reason why Cornell students continue these events. We also believed that it was extremely important to explain such terms as "After Hours" so that newcomers would know that they were different from the more mundane office hours of professors and teaching assistants. Some of the social terms do need to be explained so that students will know what to expect when they arrive at such activities. For instance, if we did not explain what a "crush party" was, then a student might not dress appropriately to the event. And there is no need for such occurrences to happen.

In the course of explaining the many various local terms, we linguistics students at times came upon instances where we were unsure of the word's spelling, as the word has never before encountered the mighty pen. In such cases, we were compelled to improvise the spelling as best we could. One such instance is with the term, "standardeeve", meaning the average deviation from the mean on an academic exam or assignment. Nobody had written the word before we compilers of the dictionary decided to include it as an entry because it is not a standard, correct word. The proper term for it is actually "standard deviation" and is usually shortened only in oral cases. We wished to include this word because we felt that students might face a bit of confusion upon hearing it for the first time and before they have had time to make the logical connection on their own. This dictionary of ours is not completely finished even with over 150 words. In fact, we do not wish to ever see it finished. We feel that because our language is a living one, it will continue to grow and change with the passing years. We would like to see other students aid us in updating this dictionary as we pass on and leave our writing seminar years because words, like fashion, tend to go out of style. Such words as "tool" and "boot" will probably no longer be used several years from now, just as the popular term "sike" back in the early 1990s are now considered outmoded and completely passe. Even some of the nicknames for the places might change over the years as new students come in with fresh ideas. We should find it much easier to update our dictionary than Samuel Johnson did with his because he needed to copy by hand all his entries. Nowadays, on our electronic dictionary, one would only need to erase certain terms and add new ones without any sort of rewriting and the job could be accomplished with the minimum amount of trouble. We do not even need to write the words by hand and would only need to type them. With such little annoyance involved, we have no excuse to not keep the dictionary updated at all times and linguistics students should all make the slight effort to keep this Dictionary of Local Usage current and in style. We compilers of this dictionary hope that it will always serve the purpose it was intended for and will helpfully guide new students into their lives at Cornell University.