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...
Mr Slang
... 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...
The snow is falling in Paris and Jonathon's thoughts turn to cocaine and laundry-theft... The snow has reached Paris and up by the fountain round which the office workers parade their flat-imprisoned chiens morning and night Fifi’s owner is wielding her caninette for which I thank her since the white may ... Read More...
Jonathon starts a new series featuring all the colours of slang by looking at cowardy-cowardy custards, jealous husbands and the yellow peril... A new year, or still thereabouts, so why not a new thread: colour. Rainbow nation slang is not – violets being simply onions or cabbage and indigo briefly plays on ... Read More...
This week Mr Slang is doin' it doggy-style with one of the counter-language's most well-used animals... Inspired yet again by in-house creativity, to wit Susan’s revelations vis-a-vis ‘Big Dawg’ parfum de chien, I tender slang’s firm hand on the leash. Ah, how we love them: movieland’s Lassie and Rinty, the Famous Five’s ... Read More...
As the calendar flips over, Mr Slang's thoughts turn to shysters, splodgers and time's horrid advance... Fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore.* Earlier this week the Editors, seeking to place us all – writers and readers both - on intellect’s Parnassus (I first typed ‘top shelf’ but I admit that ... Read More...