Happy New Year from all the Dabblers. To get you in the mood for tonight's celebrations, here's Mr Slang's very first dabble from the archives, all about being drunk... If I do a rough count of the main themes that inform my recently published Green’s Dictionary of Slang, I find – ... Read More...
Language
Erudite 'bun nating' Nige introduces the inventive pidgin language of Tok Pisin... Tok Pisin is a form of Pidgin English and is widely spoken in Papua New Guinea. It developed as a result of Pacific Islanders intermixing, when people speaking numerous different languages were sent to work on plantations in Queensland and ... Read More...
Continuing last fortnight's theme, Mr Slang examines the lexicography of 'specialist' book titles, and uncovers a "grim commentary on the tropes of male excitement..." This is it, I promise. The last one. But pondering the verbose titles of the 19th century pornography, I could but compare them with modernity, or nearly ... Read More...
We are lucky today to feature the one and only Mister Slang - Lexicographer Jonathon Green, late of this parish, who has been so busy since we last saw him that he has managed to produce not one but two new books on his life's work. Here for your reading pleasure is ... Read More...
Since his very first column for The Dabbler in January 2011, Jonathon Green has barely missed a Thursday post. But now, after some 138 posts and umpteen thousand words, we regret to say that Mr Slang has decided to relinquish his weekly duties. Everyone at The Dabbler heartily thanks him for ... Read More...
What is slang all about? Jonathon muses on stereotypes, in life and in the counter-language that holds up its dark mirror to life... I am in a cab. The cabbie asks what work I do. I explain that I write dictionaries. Dictionaries, that is, of slang. And the cabbie, who stands ... Read More...
It's holiday time, and Mr Slang is spending his summer constructing interactive timelines of popular terms for the penis. You ain't seen nothing like this before... It’s August. Holiday time, I gather. I had mine in June but no matter. My short-lived tan has faded and my mind is blank. Slang ... Read More...
Anyone fancy a 'curry te Kanawa'? Mr Slang enjoys a new lexicography of New Zealand words, even though it is a little clean for his tastes... Once upon a time there was the dictionary. It survives, of course, but not as we knew it, and those thick and squarish books are ... Read More...
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...
