Perhaps we should not be too optimistic . . . about finding something never before imagined. But we should begin by looking. And the place to begin is not in the stolid center but at the vibrant edges of language -- among the bilingual, the flouters of convention, the daring, the young -- not at the middle of the road, where all the traffic flows, but on the verge, where boundaries form and shift.
Richard W. Bailey, American linguist, "Language at the Edges" from American Speech, Winter 2000