We are lucky today to feature the one and only Mister Slang - Lexicographer Jonathon Green, late of this parish, who has been so busy since we last saw him that he has managed to produce not one but two new books on his life's work. Here for your reading pleasure is ... Read More...

Today's hero of slang is "a literary, literate fat man" who loved food and French girls' legs... I can write better than anybody who can write faster than me; and I can write faster than anybody who can write better than me. He should have lived hereafter, but instead, born in that annus ... Read More...

This week Mr Slang salutes the man who gave us such terms as Tom, Dick and Harry, tub-thumper and, ahem, buttered bun... ‘I do not love thee Dr Fell The reason why I cannot tell; But this I know and know full well, I do not love thee, Dr Fell.’ The verse we know. The author, probably ... Read More...

Today's hero of slang is the peerless P.G., whose contribution to the language, especially the language of alcohol consumption, cannot be overestimated... Setting aside, now I check, the small matter of two no. 10s in the series, this is the thirteenth Hero of Slang. I find it almost inconceivable that Wodehouse ... Read More...

This week Jonathon Green goes hunting with a Victorian writer who attacks head-on "a reality of contemporary life that Dickens almost wholly sidesteps"... Slang is urban and so am I and horses have never entered the picture. Maybe it's some residual memory of Cossacks. At the Lincolnshire Handicap of 1953, I ... Read More...

For your yuletide delight, Jonathon Green presents a seasonal selection box of slang... angel n. 1. (also fallen angel) a prostitute. 2. a young woman, esp. a pretty one; also in direct address. 3. an older gay man, usu. one who supports a younger lover. 4 .a sandwichboard-man. 5. a passive homosexual; a tramp’s young homosexual ... Read More...

Jonathon Green introduces a hero of New York slang, once a bestselling author churning out smash hit after smash hit, now all but forgotten... To the five hundred and seventy-five thousands friends who have made this series of John Henry books a success beyond all dreaming, my deepest gratitude. To the Good ... Read More...

Jonathon Green introduces the great slang lexicographer, spiritualist and possible pornographer, John Stephen Farmer... In 1890, just as what was still known as the New English Dictionary was getting properly into its stride in Oxford, there was published the first of the seven volumes of what could reasonably be called its ... Read More...

Jonathon Green reveals the original character behind the myth of the chirpy cockney sparrer... Once upon a time there was a rat. My rat. I mourn her still and sometimes I told her story: such as here. She was called Mord Em’ly (above, left). Once upon a time there was a ... Read More...

Jonathon Green salutes that great Australian stereotype and master of slang, the 'larrikin'... Let us first describe the captain, bottle-shouldered, pale and thin, For he was the beau-ideal of a Sydney larrikin; E'en his hat was most suggestive of the city where we live, With a gallows-tilt that no one, save a larrikin, can ... Read More...