His etymological career included his discovery of the origin of the word "OK", a longtime puzzle, and his scholarly study of the history and use of the common English vulgarity "fuck."
In 2014, Jesse Sheidlower, the president of the American Dialect Society, called it "the most important article" written about the term, noting that ironically, Read's 14-page essay avoided using the word directly, referring to it euphemistically instead.
[4][5] Even then, the printing was limited to 75 copies and contained a disclaimer that it should be "restricted to students of linguistics, folk-lore... and allied branches of social science.
"[6] Read wrote in a foreword:[5]Judged merely as reading matter, the following work (apart from the Introduction) is abominably, incredibly obscene, and the compiler begs that any one will lay this book down who is not prepared to look at all social phenomenon with the dispassionate eye of the anthropologist and the student of abnormal psychology.It was eventually published in the United States in 1977, under the title Classic American Graffiti, ISBN 0-916500-06-3, by Reinhold Aman's Maledicta Press.
[7] The work was described as a prototypical "model study" of latrinalia that "deserves the attention of any serious student of American language" in a 1979 review, which noted that even then it remained hard to access and "excessively rare.
[16] This achievement was described as "the pinnacle of his career" to "envious fellow etymologists" by The Economist, but Read considered it just "an agreeable diversion from his main work.
"[15] Read also successfully traced the origins of the words "dixie" and "podunk", and managed to attribute the first use of "the almighty dollar" to Washington Irving.
[14] Read's career included studies of euphemisms, graffiti, slang, pig Latin, doubletalk, and adult baby talk.