From dark tourism to Dixieland jazz, Jonathon takes us on a trip to the slang's heart of darkness... About ten years ago I went to Auschwitz. This was Auschwitz II, with its iconic ex-Austrian barracks and the that final run of railway tracks, connecting backwards, for this was among the reasons ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Jonathon Green
Mr Slang traces the original Dabbler - a 'babu' conceived by Rudyard Kipling... The lexicographer’s role being not to anticipate but to analyse I was not here for the creation, and am therefore unaware whether or not the quote that provides both rationale and motto for the Dabbler’s daily efflorescence was ... Read More...
Slang is no republican, finds Jonathon Green, but neither does it bend the knee... Sixty years ago it was happening miles away in Treetops which was in Kenya and if the Queen remembers hearing that the rest of her life had just been realigned on new and seemingly infinite rails then ... Read More...
This week Mr Slang discusses family values... I have noticed, may I assume that I am not alone, a new linguistic abomination that must now be listed among the many repellent inventions that have come with the Olympics. For this neologism we can presumably thank the PR company that coined the ... 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 is banished to Gobbler's Knob... We moved last week. Approximately 50 m. One side of the block to the other. So not far but still we moved and it meant a change of address – possibly harder for the recipient to absorb since all that has altered ... Read More...
Mr Slang explains why he finds one particular word to be the most offensive in the English language... Occasionally, when I toss some new offering onto the great heap of the unsold that is publishing (for if every birth is a death postponed, so are mint and shiny first editions merely the ... Read More...
Wallowing once again in humanity's darkest places (in this case France, and a Robert Crumb exhibition), Mr Slang suffers a bout of troubled introspection... Forgive me: I’m pondering work again. I went to an exhibition at Paris’ Musée de l’Art Moderne last week. It was dedicated to the work of Robert Crumb, ... 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...
Jonathon is away this week, so here's a gem from the archives, in which Mr Slang allows us a glimpse of the curious life of the lexicographer... This is what I do. What I have done for at least 25 years and what I intend to do, audience and body willing ... Read More...
