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Tracking regional slang and usage in any reliable way has always been cumbersome and time-consuming; the difficulty lies in “bring[ing] linguistic geography down to a human scale.” Entries in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), for instance, “have a homespun texture, demanding [that readers] reconcile various types of information in order to understand what DARE has to say about a word or phrase. … A DARE entry might include any combination of quotations from regional literature, diaries, small-town newspapers, material from WELS, the various linguistic atlases (published and unpublished), other accounts of dialect in scholarly literature, substantial personal collections donated to the project by scholars at the ends of their careers … and, of course, questionnaire responses, identified by informant, so that the curious reader can refer to the ‘List of Informants’ to discover his or her community, community type, year of birth, level of education, occupation, sex, and race—all types of information that can be overlooked in other historical dictionaries.” The profusion of real-time evidence accumulating on Twitter and Facebook must be a treasure trove for linguists and dialecticians, or at least it will be once they decide exactly how to sift and evaluate it.

— Maud Newton, “Local Twitter Slang, And All That Jawn”