Guardian arts correspondent Mark Brown says the Oxford English Dictionary is asking the public for research assistance, in an effort to substantiate the first usage of terms like “plonker,” “prat,” and “wally” in public discourse. This will actually be the OED’s second wordhunt in partnership with the BBC2 radio series Balderdash & Piffle, and OED editor John Simpson explains why they’re dipping into the well again: “Wordhunters made some remarkable discoveries in the last series. They found wordhunt words tucked away in football fanzines, LPs, school newspapers—just the sort of sources we can’t easily get our hands on.”