Language!: Five Hundred Years of the Vulgar Tongue

by Jonathon Green

In this richly entertaining book, Jonathon Green traces the development of slang and its trajectory through society, and offers an impassioned argument for its defence. Beginning, at least in recorded terms, in the gutter and the thieves' tavern, and displayed only in a few criminological pamphlets, slang has made its way up and across social classes and into every medium. There is no doubt that slang deals with those areas of life that standard English often chooses to sidestep. Certainly, slang has many more synonyms for topics such as crime, drunkenness and recreational drug-taking, sexual intercourse and the parts of the body with which we conduct it (and a variety of other functions), for madness, stupidity, unattractiveness, violence, racism and nationalism. That, for the author, is its role and its charm. Often dismissed as 'bad' language or 'swear-words', slang, he argues, is a 'counter-language', the language that says no. Born in the street it resists the niceties of the respectable. It is language's film noir, its banana skin, its pin that pops pretention. It is neither respectable nor respectful. It can be cruel, it can also be inventive, creative and very often funny. It represents us at our most human. Language! is an exuberant and rewarding work that uncovers an oral history of marginality and rebellion, of dispossession and frustration, and it shows how slang gives a vocabulary and a voice to our most guarded thoughts.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Language

Paperback

First published April 3, 2014

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

I am a lexicographer, that is a dictionary maker, specialising in slang, about which I have been compiling dictionaries, writing and broadcasting since 1984. I have also written a history of lexicography. After working on my university newspaper I joined the London ‘underground press’ in 1969, working for most of the then available titles, such as Friends, IT and Oz. I have been publishing books since the mid-1970s, spending the next decade putting together a number of dictionaries of quotations, before I moved into what remains my primary interest, slang. I have also published three oral histories: one on the hippie Sixties, one on first generation immigrants to the UK and one on the sexual revolution and its development. Among other non-slang titles have been three dictionaries of occupational jargon, a narrative history of the Sixties, a book on cannabis, and an encyclopedia of censorship. As a freelancer I have broadcast regularly on the radio, made appearances on TV, including a 30-minute study of slang in 1996, and and written columns both for academic journals and for the Erotic Review.

My slang work has reached its climax, but I trust not its end, with the publication in 2010 of Green’s Dictionary of Slang, a three volume, 6,200-page dictionary ‘on historical principles’ offering some 110,000 words and phrases, backed up by around 410,000 citations or usage examples. The book covers all anglophone countries and its timeline stretches from around 1500 up to the present day. For those who prefer something less academic, I published the Chambers Slang Dictionary, a single volume book, in 2008. Given that I am in no doubt that the future of reference publishing lies in digital form, it is my intention to place both these books on line in the near future.

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

Jonathon Green, Mister Slang himself, is the foremost slang lexicographer. I have to confess to a massive braincrush on his work, and especially the Timelines of Slang, which are a boon to a sweary historical author.

This is an overview of how slang has developed and been recorded--over time, in different countries, and in specific groups (notably Cockneys, the Army, and queer culture). It's not one of those easy-linguistics pop-science books with cute quotable factoids: it's a hefty work, and repays close attention.

It's also kind of depressing. That's not Green's fault: it's just that so much slang is either misogynistic abuse or ways of saying 'penis' and the sheer volume of both included here can really make you end up feeling like you accidentally said something feminist on Twitter. As the man says: he's recording what is, not what ought to be.

A super useful resource for anyone seriously interested in slang, and any historical writer looking for authentic vocab.

[Marshall · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a yawn-fest this turned out to be. I expected this book to be so much juicier. How could a book about the history of slang and swear words not be? You'd have to work at making a book like that boring. The author seemed to pull it off perfectly. It is extremely dry and academic. It reads like a textbook.

It's not even about the history of the words, when they were invented, how they used to be used, how they morphed, how the social mores and taboos shifted. Instead, it focuses on slang dictionaries. First called "cant" and then "flash" and then "slang," there were always those who were interested in documenting this underground, unofficial vocabulary. That's mostly what this book documents. I think this is because lexicographers just don't know much about the history except what they glean from slang dictionaries, especially in the early years.

This book is categorized by subcultures that used slang, and is only roughly chronological. For example, soldiers, students, blacks, etc, each had their own unique slang. This made it a little hard to trace the history.