Art Taylor, a local writer, critic, and George Mason University English prof who also works on GMU's annual Fall for the Book Festival, has been making a few revisions to his novel in progress. The book is set in 1984, so he's been careful about matters of historical authenticity. Very careful: In a blog post he explains why he had to replace the word dickwad with the word dickweed in a passage. Dickwad only came into circulation in 1989, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, while dickweed started making the rounds in 1984, made famous two years later in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure ("You killed Ted, you Medieval dick-weed!")

No word on the provenance on dillweed, though I'd guess it was a way for Mike Judge to get dickweed past MTV's censors, in time making the word safe for AT&T ads: