Slang man: Jonathan Green
It is 4am and I'm indulging my addiction. The first one was good, but then came another and another and now I cannot stop. I have been at it for 12 hours, watching back-to-back episodes of American police drama The Wire.
This is my world, my kind of people. Why? Because every sentence is filled with slang, the subject of my professional life.
I am a lexicographer and my latest book, Green's Dictionary of Slang, took 17 years to compile. I enjoyed every minute of it. When it's finished - or at least when you pause the language-gathering for publication, for dictionaries are never 'finished' - you take on a new role: deity.
That's deity with a small d. You've created a work of reference and that means people refer. They want to believe that when they check your 6,200 pages, your 125,000 words and phrases, your 415,000 usage examples, that they've come to the right place. So you had better make sure they have.
Writing slang dictionaries is not for everyone. Indeed there have been barely 30 since the first one appeared in 1535. And that was less a dictionary than a lengthy poem that included around 50 terms of cant, the secret language of criminals.
Most of the authors have had day jobs: printers, a magistrate, a playwright or two, a militia captain, a sporting journalist, a publisher who blended literary piracy with pornography, a teacher of Sandhurst cadets, a prison chaplain and his team of lifers, a spiritualist and the poet who wrote The Boy Stood On The Burning Deck.
Slang is what I call the counter-language, a great and everevolving vocabulary that sets itself against standard English just as humans often set themselves against an established order. And slang, whether we want to admit it or not, is very human.
It's certainly not all obscenities, but it does tackle the downsides of life. It is voyeuristic, amoral, libertarian and libertine. It wilfully refuses uncritical belief and if it can be summed up in two words: it doubts.
Slang, as critic Jonathan Meades has noted, is 'a depiction of the actual, of what we think rather than what we are enjoined to think'. It's a sort of verbal WikiLeaks, putting on display thoughts and feelings we would usually keep suppressed.
If I look through my database and list the topics that slang loves, they run as follows: crime and criminals, 5,012 terms; drink, drinking and drunks, 4,589; drugs, 3,976; money, 3,342; women (of various descriptions, almost none of them complimentary), 2,480; fools and foolish, 2,403; men (of various descriptions, often self-aggrandising), 2,183; prison, 1,743; sexual intercourse, 1,740; prostitution, 1,185. And so it goes on.
Say what? Cop show The Wire is a dream for lexicographers like Jonathan Green because it features slang in virtually every sentence
A narrow range, undoubtedly, but very deep. Why? Because slang started off as genuinely secret, hoping to ensure that such 16th Century villains as the 'upright man' (the boss) or his pal the 'counterfeit crank' (who faked gruesome wounds to get money from the gullible) might not be nabbed by the harman beck (the policeman, literally the 'magistrate's beak').
It's hard to keep it secret now. Communications are just too fast. When I was a hippy in the Sixties, spattering my conversation with 'man', 'heavy' and 'groovy', I didn't realise I was simply copying black American terms of the Thirties. Nor did I know that hippy meant a second-rater, an aspirant. Today's 'wannabe'.
Nowadays the world's young are latching on to rap slang almost as fast as it's coined. And this old hippy has to run very fast just to keep up.
But slang still has that original urge for secrecy: 'hold it on the down-low', 'hush it up', 'keep that lip zipped'. Rhyming slang was invented around 1810 because the 'pigs' (yes, even then) had worked out the current terminology. So what one gets is a succession of synonyms: discover what one means and up pops a replacement to befuddle outsiders once again.
With secrecy gone, hunting it down is simpler now. Slang is everywhere, from TV to films to comics to websites. The problem for my predecessors was finding sources. My problem, when every song lyric is online, when books, magazines and newspapers can all be downloaded, when everyone blogs, tweets or parades themselves on Facebook, is when I should dare to stop looking.
I have been helped by the ablest of researchers - we have put in maybe 50 people-years of truffling out the words. But we would never claim to be exhaustive. And the stuff keeps on coming.
I may be devoted, but I am not naive. Slang evokes controversy, criticism, disdain even. It is said to be a sign of limited vocabulary, of inarticulacy.
Of course slang doesn't work for every occasion. Emma Thompson was right recently to suggest that one would be better off at a job interview with standard English. But limited? I think not. It's a vocabulary that offers 4,500 synonyms just for drunk or 1,500 for stupidity. Inarticulate? I beg to differ.
Writers from Shakespeare to Dickens, from Joyce to the family Amis have all rejoiced in its offerings. And even Jane Austen and George Eliot were not above the occasional example. True, it's more obviously on show in William Burroughs or Irvine Welsh, let alone the songs of Snoop Dogg or Dizzee Rascal, but articulacy, like beauty, is also in the eye, or ear, of the beholder.
And the future? For the slang dictionary along with every form of reference, it has to be digital. There will be an e-book on offer next year and a website, open to its readers' contributions, is due to follow. But the content: more, much more of the same.
Talking and creating slang, as I see it, is much a part of human relationships as every other form of communication. It has been with us for centuries, and it will be around for many more.
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