The second series of Balderdash & Piffle, from the Oxford English Dictionary and BBC Two television network, will be on in the UK this spring. Now they’re soliciting help for origins or earlier uses of 40, mostly British, terms (BBC word list with explanations; OED word list with links to dictionary entries).
The show is especially useful to the OED lexicographers in the realm of slang—the kind of words they don’t always find during their constant reading of periodicals. John Simpson, chief editor of the OED, said about the first series last year: “[Wordhunters] found evidence tucked away in football [soccer] fanzines, LPs, school newspapers: just the sort of sources we can’t easily get our hands on.”
Happy hunting. Perhaps you can be like the woman from the first series who had an earlier use of Phwoar! (“Wow!”) in her diary, which is now an OED citation.
See also my post: