This week our roving wordsmith Jonathon Green rummages around in the output of our most famous Victorian writer, Charles Dickens, to see whether his urban characters spoke much in the way of realistic contemporary argot... Dickens is 200 this year and who am I to eschew the bandwagon. Write, they say, ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Jonathon Green
This week Mr Slang has teamed up with quiz-master Brit Snr (the editor's Dad, no less) to give you the chance to win a copy of his splendid big fat red Chambers Slang Dictionary... I have been dabbling for twelve months now. There or thereabouts. Many posts, many words, many slang ... Read More...
This week Mr Slang tries to penetrate the world of 'edgy'... Edge. Perfectly respectable word. From Old English ęcg. Means edge, point or corner. There it is in Beowulf. The corner sense has vanished (still exists in German ecke) but the rest march on. On edge: tetchy, nervous. Thence edgy. Kipling ... Read More...
This week Jonathon faces the lexicographer's greatest fear: popular etymology... Humankind cannot bear too much reality. T.S. Eliot Four Quartets The word coiner, in the sense of counterfeiter, is first recorded in 1578. No doubt the result of an oversight (perhaps mine, I may have missed it) the current OED, source of this ... 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...
Mr Slang looks at the nominations for 'Word of the Year' and wonders why they bother... What are words worth? Tom Tom Club ‘Wordyrappinghood’ (1981) Let us assume, why not, that it’s me. Let us assume, nothing new here, that I’m wrong. Let us assume, hardly a first in self-denial, that everyone else ... Read More...
Mr Slang examines the lexicography of 'specialist' book titles, and uncovers a "grim commentary on the tropes of male excitement..." This is it, I promise. The last one. But pondering the verbose titles of the 19th century pornography, I could but compare them with modernity, or nearly so: the mass-produced paperback equivalents ... Read More...
Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London with a trip to the 'specialist' bookshops of The Backside of St Clements... All gone now. What you’re looking at above is the Australian High Commission (though didn’t that get knocked down too a year ago or so?). Like Fred and Rose’s lair at ... Read More...
