When the 18th century Enlightenment downgraded religious awe, polite society began to clean up the lexical world of genitalia and defecation. In his introduction, Green makes the point that, in the God-fearing middle ages, blasphemous words were taboo, but four-letter terms for bodily functions were perfectly acceptable. This is the reeking fruit of his labours: an A to Z of taboo usages, from Arse (where he distinguishes "give one's arse a salad," meaning to have sex outdoors, from "give someone arseholes," meaning to attack verbally) to Zoo, where the animal imagery of sex includes "slapping the monkey" (masturbation) and "shooting the beaver," (looking up a lady's skirt). Over a quarter-century, he has delighted in taxonomising thousands of terms for body parts, sexual activity, disease and bathroom practices that are not generally discussed in the presence of children, clergymen, great-aunts and Mr Charles Moore. His Cassell's Dictionary of Slang (1998) and Chambers Slang Dictionary (2008) are phenomenal compendia of "non-standard usages," ranging across the whole lexicon of English bar-room coinages. Green calls it “counter-language.Jonathon Green is the nation's indefatigable lexicographer of filth, a tireless troweller in the slurry of the unsayable. Why is slang, vaguely defined as a set of informal words and phrases, so interesting? For Green, it’s “a language that expresses us at our most human.” When we use slang words-for sex, body parts, or insults-we’re talking in our “most honest and most human way.” There’s also something subversive and rebellious about it. In the 17th century, “a fizzle” referred to breaking wind two hundred years later, it evolved to mean a failed task. In addition to meaning stupid, “bonkers” also meant mildly drunk in a 1984 citation a definition that is less widely used 32 years later. Green cites “cool,” which first cropped up in 1766, as one that still holds today. Then there are the words that change meaning.
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Slang is also a window into how some words fall out of circulation entirely, while others just don’t go away. Its first mention was in an Australian newspaper in 1905. With that in mind, lexicographers keep looking for older citations-one of Green’s rules of slang is that a word is “always a bit older than you think it is.” The verb “to dis”, for example, has roots earlier than 1980s hip hop. Grasping slang is not so much about getting up to speed with modern or “youth” speech, but observing the latest lexical twist on something. For some people it’s “simply the language they speak and the words they use,” he says. “I need something I can quote, it has to have been recorded,” he says, explaining why he doesn’t do fieldwork.
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That particular exercise threw up over 400 citations.
#Dictionary of slang jonathan green tv#
He’ll trawl through lyrics, film and TV scripts, fiction, bibliographies in other authors’ books, and box sets-he once watched the entirety of The Wire, and as soon as a word came up, he’d stop, go back, transcribe, and trace it. He sifts through newspaper archives, picking out, say, a columnist from the mid-20th century and reading through their work to pluck out specific terms to trace.
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There is, Green says, “an element of dropping the stone in the pond and seeing where the ripple takes you.” Finding hundreds and thousands of slang words isn’t a straightforward affair.