Even crème fraîche can be described as 'edgy' these days - has the term lost all meaning?... Words have to multi-task. It comes with their territory. One dictionary entry, several, even many definitions; some nuanced others seemingly oppositional though there, perhaps, one may have a homonym. The bulk of slang is ... Read More...
Mr Slang
In honour of the new Princeling, Mr Slang is talking kids... I love children, as Nancy Mitford put it so well, especially when they cry: for then someone takes them away. Mitford of course lived in Paris where they have a more robust attitude to those who have yet to acquire ... Read More...
Jonathon Green introduces a 16th century printer and 'compiler of cant' who arguably produced the very first dictionary of slang... Bokes be not set by: there tymes is past, I gesse; The dyse and cardes, in drynkynge wyne and ale, Tables, cayles[1], and balles, they be now sette a sale Men lete theyr chyldren ... Read More...
Jonathon Green reviews a new edition of a groundbreaking work of Anglo-Indian lexicography... Hobson Jobson A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive was published in 1886. Its name comes from an Englished pronunciation of ‘Ya Hassan! Ya Hossein!’ as cried at ... Read More...
He was the bard of Chicago and he tried to steal Simone de Beauvoir from Satre... Mr Slang introduces the man behind The Man with the Golden Arm... As Hamlet put it, look here upon this picture. And see before you, dare I attest, a proper writer: specs, work-shirt, hair a little ... Read More...
Italy has given the world delicious food, beautiful people and boring football. But what has it gifted to slang? Jonathon Green investigates... I have been in Italy enjoying the kindness of friends. I, or such parts as were exposed, am now a pleasing light brown, patched pallid[1] only where shaded by ... Read More...
From Nazi Germany to 9/11, Jonathon Green explains why true believers don't use slang... ‘Before [the Al Qaeda training camp] they were joking around and using slang. After the camp the guys were talking jihad, praying and quoting the Koran.’ British jihadist, quoted in Jason Burke The 9/11 Wars (2011) Humankind, as ... Read More...
Mr Slang is away this week, but this corker from the archives 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 ... Read More...
Jonathon Green celebrates the golden age of hardboiled, noir US sports journalism... It’s a funny thing about people. People will hate a guy all his life for what he is, but the minute he dies for it they make him out a hero and they go around saying that maybe he ... Read More...
Rub-a-dub-dub, this week Mr Slang is talking butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers... Rub-a-dub-dub means a pub in rhyming slang, or certainly so in Australia, where it can be abbreviated as rubby or phoneticized as rubbidy. Like a percentage of the type it stems from ascertainable origins, in this case the nursery rhyme ... Read More...
