Language!

Five Hundred Years of the Vulgar Tongue

By Jonathon Green

2014

First Published

3.43

Average Rating

555

Number of Pages

16H57M

Audio Length

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.

Avg Rating

3.43

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

4 STARS

64%

3 STARS

2 STARS

1 STARS

14%

goodreads

Author

Jonathon Green

Author · 17 books

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. I am a lexicographer, that is a dictionary maker, specialising in slang, about which I have been compiling dictionaries, writing and broadcasting since 1984. I have also written a history of lexicography. After working on my university newspaper I joined the London ‘underground press’ in 1969, working for most of the then available titles, such as Friends, IT and Oz. I have been publishing books since the mid-1970s, spending the next decade putting together a number of dictionaries of quotations, before I moved into what remains my primary interest, slang. I have also published three oral histories: one on the hippie Sixties, one on first generation immigrants to the UK and one on the sexual revolution and its development. Among other non-slang titles have been three dictionaries of occupational jargon, a narrative history of the Sixties, a book on cannabis, and an encyclopedia of censorship. As a freelancer I have broadcast regularly on the radio, made appearances on TV, including a 30-minute study of slang in 1996, and and written columns both for academic journals and for the Erotic Review. My slang work has reached its climax, but I trust not its end, with the publication in 2010 of Green’s Dictionary of Slang, a three volume, 6,200-page dictionary ‘on historical principles’ offering some 110,000 words and phrases, backed up by around 410,000 citations or usage examples. The book covers all anglophone countries and its timeline stretches from around 1500 up to the present day. For those who prefer something less academic, I published the Chambers Slang Dictionary, a single volume book, in 2008. Given that I am in no doubt that the future of reference publishing lies in digital form, it is my intention to place both these books on line in the near future.