Is this dictionary serious?
It’s serious, in the sense that I’m not joking — the words really exist and they are (or were) really in use; the examples are as natural as I can make them up; and the explanations and etymologies I give are accurate to my knowledge. It’s not that serious considering I’m just a regular guy with no formal academic training to compile a dictionary, and I haven’t done any kind of fieldwork.
Why are you so rude?
This is not an abridged, kids-safe dictionary. Read it and you’ll find many slang words that are profanity, that name sexual practices, that refer very crudely to bodily functions, etc. There’s also slang about “nice” things, of course, but there’s no point in censoring things that may make you blush. They exist, I report them.
What’s ps-ref?
Pseudo-reflexive verb. All Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French…) have a number of these. In Spanish, in the infinitive, they can be recognized by the particle -se attached to the verb, which is commonly a mark of reflexivity, i.e. an action executed on its subject. Pseudo-reflexive verbs employ this particle but they’re not truly reflexive. In general, they show actions of a grammar category known as “middle voice”, which convey the idea of things done for the subject’s benefit. For example, tomar can be used in its non-reflexive form to mean just ‘drink’, but tomarse adds an indefinite positive feeling to the idea of having a drink. Tomé un vaso de cerveza is something you could say to a police officer if you’re stopped by a road-side blood alcohol content check — it’s a cold description of the fact that you had one glass of beer. But Me tomé un vaso de cerveza is more like what you’d say to a friend on a hot day, in a tone showing satisfaction — it was you drinking up a glass of delicious beer. This example is not restrictive — it’s also common to say Me tomé una aspirina pero me sigue doliendo, ‘I took an aspirin but it still hurts’. In this case, the pseudo-reflexive mark simply emphasizes you did something for yourself; again, Tomé una aspirina sounds more like something you’d say to a doctor.
There are other pseudo-reflexive verbs which just happen to be used like that compulsorily, for example caerse ‘to fall’. It’s entirely possible to say Caí por las escaleras, but at least in Argentina that sounds bookish; the only acceptable non-literary form is Me caí por las escaleras, ‘I fell down the stairs’.
What are those v, vt, vi thingies?
They indicate the transitivity of a verb. The label vt means that the word is a verb and it is transitive; vi means it’s an intransitive verb; and just v means it can be both. A verb is transitive (or functions as transitive) if it requires an object, and intransitive if not.
What about the grammar?
This is a dictionary, not a grammar textbook. You may want to check the following Wikipedia articles: Spanish language, Spanish grammar, Rioplatense Spanish. Most of the grammar of the Argentine Rioplatense dialect is just regular Spanish grammar. The differences are mostly details of usage and verb conjugation. Rioplatense uses a second person singular pronoun (vos) that is not found, or is found only in restricted contexts, in other dialects, and the verb usually changes accordingly in some tenses.
