Language!

Five Hundred Years of the Vulgar Tongue

Jonathon Green

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782393795
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

In this richly entertaining book, Jonathon Green traces the development of slang and its trajectory through society, and offers an impassioned argument for its defence. Beginning, at least in recorded terms, in the gutter and the thieves' tavern, and displayed only in a few criminological pamphlets, slang has made its way up and out: across social classes and into every medium.

There is no doubt that slang deals with those areas of life that standard English often chooses to sidestep. Certainly, slang has many more synonyms for topics such as crime, drunkenness and recreational drug-taking, sexual intercourse and the parts of the body with which we conduct it (and a variety of other functions), for madness, stupidity, unattractiveness, violence, racism and nationalism. That, for the author, is its role and its charm.

Often dismissed as 'bad' language or 'swear-words', slang, he argues, is a 'counter-language', the language that says no. Born in the street it resists the niceties of the respectable. It is language's film noir, its banana skin, its pin that pops pretention. It is neither respectable nor respectful. It can be cruel, it can also be inventive, creative and very often funny. It represents us at our most human.

Language! is an exuberant and rewarding work that uncovers an oral history of marginality and rebellion, of dispossession and frustration, and it shows how slang gives a vocabulary and a voice to our most guarded thoughts.

Contents

	Preface
1	Introduction: Slang: A User’s Manual
2	In the Beginning: The Pre-History
3	Lewd, Lousey Language: Beggars and Their Books
4	Crime and Punishment: The Vocabulary of Villainy
5	Play’s the Thing: The Stage and the Song
6	The Sound of the City: No City, No Slang
7	Flash: This Sporting Life
8	Down Under: Larrikin Lingo
9	Sex in the City: The Agreeable Ruts of Life
10	Cockney Sparrers: Mean Streets and Music Halls
11	America: Pioneers
12	Keeping Score: Nineteenth-century Slang Lexicography
13	Gayspeak: The Lavender Lexicon
14	American Century: The Slang Capital of the World
15	African-American Slang: The Flesh Made Word
16	Campus and Counter-Culture: Teenage Skills
17	War: One Thing It’s Good For
18	Conclusion: As It Was in the Beginning
	Notes
	Bibliography
	Acknowledgements
	Index

Preface

This is a history of slang, the city’s language.

It is an under-discussed topic and with one exception¹ the last book-length attempt to tackle that history came in 1933: the slang lexicographer Eric Partridge’s Slang To-day and Yesterday. In his case his researches were somewhat tentative, since he had yet to embark on the dictionaries that would make him the twentieth century’s leading collector of the language. I can offer no such excuse: what follows is drawn from thirty years of slang study, and for much of the purely lexical research I have extracted material from the twenty years of work amassed by myself and others in making the multi-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang (2010) and on my continuing expansion and improvement of the database that underpins it.

Linguists have not, in general, paused to look that hard at slang. I am not one and I cannot pretend to remedy that omission. What I offer is very much the story of the language, its development and proliferation, those who have used it in plays, novels, journalism and other forms of story-telling and media, and, where necessary, those who have, especially in its early days, kept it alive by collecting it into glossaries and then dictionaries.

Thus this is a lexicographer’s history, and in that I am following a tradition. Those few who have attempted to offer the history of the language have always been those who knew it first as practice, and collected the underlying history and devolved their theories afterwards. Without their dictionaries, in which such information appears as an introduction, we would know even less of the subject. What they and I offer is, one might say, a figurative ‘etymology’ of a whole lexis. The story not just of a single word or phrase, but of an entire vocabulary.

It is also the lexicographer-historian who has privileged access to the extent of slang, the sheer size of the lexis. As will be seen, that lexis is governed by a variety of dominant themes, and thus offers substantial areas of synonymy, but it cannot be made too clear that there is much more to the vocabulary than the misguided popular assumption that limits slang to a few dozen so-called obscenities and a page or two of rhyming slang. Standard English covers all the areas that does slang, but slang illumines them in unprecedentedly creative ways.

This is not the history of all slang – that is, every one of the near 120,000 words that make up a lexis that has been recorded for half a millennium, and from across the English-speaking world. Instead I have focused on certain strands that run through the word-list. If it can offer no other defining aspect, then slang offers a highly thematic vocabulary: sex both private and commercial; crime in all its aspects, bodily parts and functions, insults both person-to-person and racist/nationalist, drink and drugs … One can see these themes in embryo when slang was originally recorded, and they remain its staples today. Reading such examples as I have included, one can see them in every instance of use and collection. There are local differences – typically the different styles and stimuli in America or Australia – but the over-riding themes will always emerge. Slang represents humanity at its most human, and that is not fettered by borders. Were I to have essayed non-anglophone slangs, I am certain that nothing would have changed.

The book is based roughly on chronological development, but after the eighteenth century, with the gradual accretion of the home-grown slangs of Australia and the United States, and the emergence of special slangs such as those of the campus, this must to an extent be abandoned, since developments are running in parallel. I have also chosen, among other subject-specific enquiries — among them slangs of students, teenagers, and of homosexuality — to approach the vastly important subject of African-American slang by itself. That anglophone slang is now dominated by America, and especially black America, might be thought to return everything to a central track, but as is the case throughout, niche vocabularies have ensured that there are now many slangs on offer.

If the early centuries of slang’s recorded existence permit one to read most if not all of that limited roster of authors who allow its words into their work, initially as the criminal language cant and then expanding to include more general material, by the nineteenth century that aim has been defeated, and since then rendered a foolish dream. Even the long-term lexicographer can only hope to sample. And with the arrival of the on-line riches of the internet, even sampling becomes harder by the day. What I have attempted is to use literary and where pertinent social developments to give the slang vocabulary a backdrop. For that I have had to select, ever more so as time progresses. I have chosen exemplars and looked at them in detail, but I have no doubt that rivals could exist and that those rivals could be used to assert the same points. To me this persistent expansion is one of slang’s glories. Like the Chinese trickster Monkey, it remains irrepressible.

Slang’s trajectory has been social as well as linguistic. Beginning, at least in recorded terms, in the gutter and the thieves’ tavern, and displayed only in a few criminological pamphlets, it has made its way up and out: across classes and into every medium. If the iceberg was once almost wholly submerged, some kind of sociolinguistic global melting has spread its waters throughout the sea of general speech. Even if at its creative core there remains an irreducible minimum of consciously developed incomprehensibility. Slang, after all, is not intended for unfettered understanding. But that secrecy has also eroded: modern communications are simply too fast and too omnivorous of all forms of available information. And slang, once despised, has become alluring, sexy, ‘cool’. There is a need to know and thus to use. In language terms it remains a thing apart, but like cool itself, now wholly accessible.

For me slang represents in its preoccupations both the circus and the sewer, the unfettered pleasure principle and that which is consciously hidden and only shamefully revealed: the ‘dirty words’ as some would term them. Yet it remains as much a part of the English language as any other of its subsets. It is not standard, it has no wish to be, but it has a role to play and it is sustained and will continue to be used and to be invented. This is not its whole story – we have no concrete ‘beginning’ and while humanity thrives there is no reason for there to arrive an ‘end’ – but it is my hope that I have laid out a good representation of what we have.

Jonathon Green
London and Paris, 2013

1	Introduction: Slang: A User’s Manual

Slang: The Language That Says ‘No’

Slang, widely seen as ‘the language of streets’, is far harder to define than it is to use. There have been dozens of definitions, whether lexicographical, linguistic, or simply from those who want to pin down something so hugely popular, yet so elusive. It seems sensible, then, to turn to the people who throng those streets for the current version. This is what we find in Wikipedia,¹ the distilled wisdom of the crowd:

Slang […] the use of informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker’s dialect or language. Slang is often to be found in areas of the lexicon that refer to things considered taboo (see euphemism). It is often used to identify with one’s peers and, although it may be common among young people, it is used by people of all ages and social groups.

There is nothing there to dispute. But there is much to add. The definitions found in works of reference are by their nature concise, pared to the bone. They do not deal in nuance. Let us, at the outset, add some suggestions.

Above all its functions, slang is a ‘counter-language’, the language that says no. Born in the street, it resists the niceties of the respectable. It is impertinent, mocking, unconvinced by rules, regulations and ideologies. It is a subset of language that since its earliest appearan...