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...
Language
Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London with a look at the chequered history of Black Mary's Hole... We have been to Clerkenwell before and here we are again. I shall forswear Pissing Alley, long bowdlerized as Passing Alley but still redolent of the odours that named it; I shall ... Read More...
Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London by venturing into an area just off Bethnal Green Road known as the "worst street in London"... So which was the worst street in London? Marked in the most stygian black (‘lowest class...occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals’) on Charles Booth’s ... Read More...
From Fu Manchu to Fred Astaire this week, as Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London by venturing into the East End's Chinatown and the heady scents of opium and white slavery ... It's not so much the slang coinage, because Limehouse as such didn't generate any (other than the rhyming slang ... Read More...
Death-sweats, Paddington spectacles and gallows humour this week, as Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London with a trip to Tyburn... It is an old place. A crossroads where as we know wicked deeds assemble. It had a marker: Oswulf’s stone, seemingly pre-Roman and which may have been the meeting-place ... Read More...
Jonathon Green continues his eye-popping slang tour of London with a look at St Giles, once described as offering ‘the lowest conditions under which human life is possible’... The first time I saw the flaming mot, Was at the sign of the Porter Pot. I called for some purl, and we had it ... Read More...
Mr Slang raises a fourth glass of port to the famous Loamshire regiment, heroes of innumerable imaginary battles... ‘All that remains is the orderly –sergeant’s voice reading orders to the new blood in the quiet summer evening in sleepy Loamshire, with its laughing English fields and gay hedgerows spread about the ... Read More...
‘Adam gave names to all created things; his Yiddish-speaking descendants offer critiques' - here's Jonathon Green's guide to the Jewish language of the put-down... Yiddish, sometimes known as Jüdisch -Deutsch (Jewish-German) is the dialect of German spoken by the German or Ashkenazi (Hebrew: ‘German’, i.e. European) Jews. It has been recorded ... Read More...
Irivine Welsh's novels contain some of the densest slang writing in fiction. Jonathon 'Mr Slang' Green ventures into the dark side of Scottish language... It is a good thing that Eric Partridge was spared Irvine Welsh. Not because the former was a bad lexicographer nor the latter a bad writer, but ... Read More...
In today's poetry feature, Stephen finds peace at the journey's end... I first encountered the word "bourne" in the title of a poem by Christina Rossetti. I had no idea what it meant, but I immediately felt that it was a lovely word. There was something about the look and the ... Read More...
