Slang provides 135 synonyms for death, and 235 apiece for 'die' and 'dead'. Jonathon Green goes in search of the Grim Reaper... Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead. So have the celebrants pronounced, but doesn’t singing that render one a Munchkin and surely the only useful time for a dictator to ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Jonathon Green
Ebullient, unembarrassable and the model for Rat in The Wind in the Willows - Mr Slang introduces the remarkable lexicographer Frederick Furnivall... Fink, Frith, what next? asked John Halliwell. Two F-words, we must have another. So here he is: Frederick Furnivall (1825-1910), bearded, pink-tied, vegetarian, oarsman, controversialist, muscular Christian socialist, midwife ... Read More...
The latest in Jonathon's irregular (and irregularly numbered) Heroes of Slang series is actually a heroine... I took Maths O Level in late 1962 and passed. It was my last encounter with the subject. Only geography from which I was removed having managed to claim the wooden spoon three terms in ... Read More...
This week Mr Slang takes us back to 19th Century America and a remarkable 'Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature, and the Stage’... ‘I’m a Salt River Roarer! I’m a ring-tailed squealer! I'm a reg'lar screamer from the ol’ Massassip’! WHOOP! I’m the very infant that refused his milk ... Read More...
Jonathon Green returns to his series on London and slang with a visit to the fishwives of Billingsgate... Billingsgate. As in fish. As in Belin’s Gate which may memorialize one Belin, who, according to Charles Dickens Jr’s Dictionary of the Thames (1881) and quoting Geoffrey of Monmouth, was a king and ... Read More...
... and also bunyips, whangdoodles and snollygosters - it's Mr Slang's guide to monsters... The usual taxonomy of slang is derived from searching themes and is, like much else, dependant on what one did at some earlier, quite possibly ill-worked out and at all too premature a stage. The childhood, as ... Read More...
Jonathon is amongst the dreaming spires this week, as he considers Oxfordian slang... I was in Oxford yesterday. Waiting for my train home I noticed that the marketing boys and girls have been in and that the old place is now labelled the city of ‘learning and culture’ which is I ... Read More...
Jonathon reviews Terence Blacker's new novel - and contemplates the role of rats in fiction... These are the primary stereotypes with which slang burdens the rat. All are negative, none may be observed in the actual animal. They are, as should be apparent, the characteristics of human beings. Those, in every ... Read More...
The internet has revolutionised the lexicographer's ability to find authoritative information, says Jonathon Green. So why do so many still reject authority...? It is a truth universally acknowledged that the ever-expanding aggregation of digitized information that we shorthand as ‘the Net’ has changed the game. All the games. Being no doubt ... Read More...
Nuffle your clod! Jonathon Green takes us back to the 1830s, and the luridly melodramatic Newgate Novels that were the precursors of the 'penny-dreadfuls'... In a box of the stone jug I was born, Of a hempen widow the kid forlorn, And my father, as I've heard say, Was a merchant of capers gay, Who ... Read More...
