So, is this what research looks like in the internet age?

It is an uncomfortable kind of research. Given that internet users seem to be quickly developing there own dialect, it seems wrong to ask such a homogenous group if a particular usage of a word is still in use. I guess languagehat was looking for positives. He didn't get any so I suppose he marks the word as being deprecated or he starts to ask other people.

I think there's a wider question here about language. Because we're so steeped in the culture of the last 60 years (films, books), words which fall out of common usage are still (by and large) understood. Nobody uses the word skirt, but everyone knows what it means.

All we've proved is that the particular subculture that is internet-savvy and uses Metafilter doesn't regularly use the word skirt. But I know that the word is still in use by some groups (urban hip-hop, perhaps?), just like lots of other archaic slang terms are.

So what does that mean for lh? I dunno - that's an editorial choice.

I dunno muddgirl. I thought it proved that within that grouping, Australians are the most likely to use the term in that context.