You’re on your way to Lit Hum and hear “fuck” and “shit” coming out of a classroom down the hall. You check the room, expecting a brawl over Aeneas’ ability as a leader or an intense debate over U.S. economic policy, only to find a room full of scholars, students, and even elementary school teachers discussing the history of slang.

On Friday, the Lexicography Society held a discussion featuring Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Madeline Kripke, a Barnard College alumna and the owner of the second largest private collection of dictionaries in the world.

The talk focused on the prudish – and often humorous – approaches dictionaries throughout history have used to define “fuck” and other words associated with sex.

Whether it may be circularity (such as defining sexual intercourse as sexual union and vice versa) or an overly vague avoidance of the word (defining irrumo as committing “a beastly act”), dictionaries have long been dancing around the topic of sex without directly addressing it.

Even the American legal system has pointed this out. In an 1846 case overseen by the Supreme Court of Missouri, a man successfully sued for slander when another man accused him of “fucking” a mare. The defense argued that because “fuck” was not published in the dictionary at the time, the accusation could not exist as slander (they lost).

Definitions of words involving sex can also be plagued with a narrow viewpoint. According to many dictionaries, women cannot “prong” men, and sexual intercourse can only involve a man and a woman.

Yin Yin Lu, founder of the Lexicography Society, was inspired to start the society’s salon-style meetings after finding the lexicography offices of the Oxford English Dictionary surprisingly quiet.

And, to Lu, words that are yelled with friends, but whispered in lecture halls seemed like a topic that could get students talking, “You don’t need a background to talk about slang,” Lu said.