There are, in round figures, some 100,000 words and phrases in the slang vocabulary. That's half a millennium's coinage, of course, and it's not just British English.

Next time you're on the green, try not to airmail your shot into the drink, cabbage or kitty litter, okay? To get a handle on golf's rich vocabulary, we called PGA professional and author Mark Blakemore, who runs well-known golf schools in Northern California. Mark takes us down the linguistic fairway:

Airmail. "It means you either hit a shot that flew too far, or a drive that carried in the air farther than anybody else's ball."

Albatross. "A score of three under par on a hole, which doesn't happen very often. The word comes from the fact that an albatross is a rare bird. Naming hierarchy in scoring is like that. A hole in one on a par five, for example, is called a condor, which is an almost extinct bird, of course.

Cabbage. "Slang for long grass off the edges of a fairway. It describes very long rough, like those at the British Open or U.S. Open. The words spinach and lettuce are also used."

Drink. "Refers to a water hazard. 'In the drink' means into the water."

Erin McKean is the editor of the The New Oxford American Dictionary, the New World cousin of the authoritative, if bulky, Oxford English Dictionary (20 volumes!). She fell in love with words early -- Erin's wanted to be a lexicographer since she was eight years old. She got her wish, working on the Thorndike-Barnhart children's dictionaries for eight years after getting a BA/MA in Linguistics. She's been at Oxford since 2000. We spoke to Erin about writing dictionaries:

You know what "booze" means, of course, but what if you asked someone in London for a definition -- say, 500 years ago? Lexicographer Jonathon Green will tell you the word is a lot older than you might think. He's spent the last quarter century studying slang, and its history, in the English language. The respected editor of the authoritative Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon's written over a dozen books on the subject and has collected a database of over 100,000 slang words. He's now working on a mammoth multi-volume dictionary, due out in 2008, that will cover a half a millennium's worth of words, phrases and figures of speech -- salty and otherwise -- that have seeped into English as slang. We talked to Jonathon about his passion: