Jonathon Green's Blog, page 2

Taking Slang Seriously I

This is a lecture I gave recently as part of the British Library’s Evolving English program. To accommodate its length I have broken it down into this introduction, and three further parts.

Slang. In the words of the late, and indubitably great Ian Dury: ‘Arseholes, bastards, fucking, cunts and pricks’.  That’s right: ‘Dirty words’. ‘Bad language’. That is, is it not, the popular view. And the popular view is half right. Slang is not ‘bad’ but it is language. It is language as much as is standard English, as much as is jargon, as much as is technicality.  As much as is any of the variant registers that make up English. Or for that matter, and in local context, that make up French, Spanish, Italian, German and so many more.

The book I have just seen published, the three-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang, was seventeen years in the making. The entirety of my work on slang goes back another ten, to the researches for a far slimmer lexicon, the Dictionary of Contemporary Slang. The entirety of the headwords in that book, some 11,500, would fit easily into those now on offer in just the letter S. The big book was born in 1993 when I started putting together the single-volume Cassell Dictionary of Slang. No citations allowed, but once it appeared, in 1998, I was commissioned to create the larger work , to be compiled ‘on historical principles’ which means including usage examples. We had the Cassell material as a core. All we had to do, thereafter, was pick up some citations. We picked up around 575,000, of which 415,000 have been used in the book. But if the Cassell material remains the core, it is a very different work. There was a good deal more work to do.

We have drawn on an infinity of sources, and were I to try, it would be quite impossible to reverse engineer what is now in print. In this case I say ‘we’ because if my name is on the cover, I have depended vastly on the dedication and the skills of others. Did this cite come from some research by my partner, Susie Ford, who spent a decade truffling out material from libraries in London and New York. A veritable ratte de bibliothèque. Or was this one a gift from Google Book Search, that useful however  poorly edited source, which renders hypocrites of all of us who use it: simultaneously claiming that Messrs Page and Brin are only thieves, stealing our copyrights as they pretend to enrich the world, as we in turn grab for the material they offer. Or from my peerless editor Sarah Chatwin, demanding that I cannot simply offer a headword, but must trace some proof of its existence. Or plagiarized, or at least borrowed, from my predecessor Eric Partridge, or from the OED, or from some other abecedary which has found what I cannot. Or simply from the 6000-plus books that have been read, the hundreds of newspapers and magazines, the ballads and broadsides, the websites, blogs, lyrics, scripts and all the rest? I can no longer remember.

Taking Slang Seriously II

What I do know is that I have dedicated my life to taking slang seriously. In every sense of the phrase. Amassing a database and thence a dictionary from the widest possible sources, and assessing what I have found in a manner that I hope both exceeds and by-passes the slipshod, easy dismissal of the topic as ‘dirty words’.

That said, slang certainly offers a vocabulary and a voice to all our negatives. Our inner realities: lusts, fears, hatreds, self indulgences. It subscribes to nothing but itself – no belief systems, no true believers, no faith, no religion, no politics, no party. It is, for Freudians, the linguistic id.

The id, as laid out in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis of 1933:  ;is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, […]  most of this is of a negative character […]. We all approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations… It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.’

Id. The German and before that Latin for ‘it’. And it, as you will all know, stands in slang for sex.

Slang is the lexical reification of the comedian Lenny Bruce’s dictum: ‘Everybody wants what should be. But there is no what should be, there is only what is.’ Slang, as the critic Jonathan Meades has noted, is ‘a depiction of the actual, of what we think rather than what we are enjoined to think.’ Slang is even, dare I suggest, a sort of lexical WikiLeaks, revelatory of our own otherwise guarded opinions.

It is voyeuristic, amoral, libertarian and libertine. It is vicious. It is cruel. It is self-indulgent. It treats all theologies – secular as well as spiritual – with the contempt that they deserve. It is funny. It is fun.

Given its position on the margins one might see it as a means of self-affirmation: I denigrate/blaspheme/utter obscenities, therefore I am. Shouting dark words into the darkness of the world. Like the tramp I see almost daily on my walks along a street near my flat in Paris, it lies cheerfully in the gutter. And like him it may be gazing at the stars, but far more likely beneath the skirts of passing women. And ‘gutter’ is the word, not ‘ditch’ , because slang is the language of the city. For Jack-the-lad not Johnny hayseed.

Standard dictionary definitions of ‘slang’ make clear what it is that links the city and its language: the over-riding suggestion is of speed, fluidity, movement. The descriptors that recur are ‘casual’, ‘playful’, ‘ephemeral’, ‘racy’, ‘humorous’, ‘irreverent’. These are not the terminology of lengthy, measured consideration. Slang’s words are twisted, turned, snapped off short, re-launched at a skewed angle. Some with their multiple, and often contrasting definitions seem infinitely malleable, shape-shifting: who knows what hides round their syllabic corners. It is not, I suggest, a language that works out of town; it requires the hustle and bustle, the rush, the lights, the excitement and even the muted (sometimes far from muted) sense of impending threat. To use slang confidently one needs that urban cockiness. It doesn’t work behind a yoke of oxen, even athwart a tractor. Then there are the value judgements: ‘sub-standard’, ‘low’, ‘vulgar’, ‘unauthorized’. The word we are seeking is street. Street as noun, more recently street as adjective. The vulgar tongue. The gutter language.

In a way slang is the true esperanto – the real international language. And even if because it is found in so many different languages it cannot be a true esperanto, it remains so in its over-arching imagery and its role in communication and as a statement of self.

There are few languages that have resisted a slang. Perhaps they are spoken in the few countries that have no city, slang’s necessary crucible. Languages, of course, are different: some vastly, some relatively slightly, but all are different.  But in their slangs as in the humans who speak them: plus ça change. The details differ, the big picture is much the same.  Slang has a story, and that story has universal themes.

Slang’s thematic range is not wide, though its synonymy runs very deep, and one can see the same ideas recurring from classical Greek and Latin onwards. The very narrowness of this ‘waterfront’ is the best testament to its utility. Stripped down, modernist, cutting edge – at whatever time, that is, that it has reflected the currently ‘modern’ and whatever edge has been at that moment ‘cutting’.

Which proves to me at least that even if the individual terms that make up the vocabulary may be dismissed as ‘ephemeral’– and that is a far from accurate dismissal – the persistence of these themes ensures that slang lasts. The imagery does not vanish; it is not short-term. It reflects the way that we think of certain topics. One might call it stereotyping since it is often in stereotypes that slang deals but could a better synonym be psychological ‘shorthand’?

So what do the similarities tell us? That the basic concerns remain consistent in slang as they do in much that is human: sex, money, intoxication, fear (of others), aggrandizement (of oneself). Let me offer a rough taxonomy of the hundred-odd thousand words and phrases in the book.

Crime and Criminals 5012 / Drink, Drinks, Drinking and Drunks 4589 / Drugs 3976 / Money 3342 / Women (of various descriptions, almost none of them complementary)  2480 / Fools and Foolish 2403 / Men (of various descriptions, not invariably, but often self-aggrandising) 2183/ Sexual Intercourse 1740 / Penis: 1351 / Homosexuals/-ity 1238 / Prostitute/-ion 1185 / Vagina 1180 / Policeman / Policing 1034 / Masturbate/-ion 945 /  Die, Death, Dead 831 / Beat or Hit 728 / Mad 776 / Anus or Buttocks 634 / Terms of Racial or National abuse: 570 (+ derivations = c. 1000, with blacks and Jews leading the parade) / Defecate/-ion & Urinate/-ion 540 / Kill or Murder 521 / Unattractive 279 / Angry 255 / Fat 247 / Vomiting 219

All concrete. No abstracts. Caring, sharing, selflessness and compassion: sweet fuck all.

If slang can boast a single abstract concept, it is doubt,  with which it mocks and undermines every vestige of true belief. With that in mind, let me offer some heresies:

Although the word slang has received definitions in every major dictionary since Webster’s American in 1828, it remains a slippery customer.  Unlike such peers as ‘dialect’ or ‘technical’ it defeats the linguists who seek to establish it in a specific register. Even the OED seems confused: its current definition runs thus: ‘Language of a highly colloquial type, considered as below the level of standard educated speech, and consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense.’ But slang is not colloquial; that’s its point. Colloquialisms are not slang. That’s theirs. Other dictionaries are equally baffled. Slang ducks and slang dives. We are forced to accept the answer of an essay of 1978, which asked ‘Is slang a word for linguists’. And  answered: ‘No’.May I suggest then that the official definitions of ‘slang’ are ultimately a waste of time, intellectual marginalia for a supremely non-  (but not anti-) intellectual code. And like pornography, conveniently defined as that which induces an erection in an otherwise elderly and impotent judge, we know it when we see it.

To me its greatest charm is that at its heart, even its most obscene and gutter-dwelling heart, it is subversive. This is not political subversion – slang is above politics – but a subversion of the English language itself. And by subverting English, it subverts the givens of the world that English informs. So many of its terms do no more than turn standard usages upside down. Appropriating them for reinterpretations that mock their lost respectability. Standing aside, voluntarily or otherwise, from the standard world, the slang user rejects standard language and substitutes a code within which he/she feels secure and which serves to define him/herself. Of course no-one exists purely in slang-world. It is feasible, perhaps, in a closed society such as a prison, but rarely elsewhere. One must discard slang to enter ‘real life’ just as many of us must still discard casual clothes to go to work.

Taking Slang Seriously III

And for all that I suggested earlier, is it really a language? or no more than an aggregation of words. A lexis. A vocabulary. If a language demands the fulfillment of certain rules: pronunciation, word order, grammar, then no, it is not. It is marginal, used by the marginal, expresses marginality. Those who use it may see it as a language, they may be wrong. That posited etymology, the s for ‘secret’ and lang for ‘language’ suggests that the belief is deep. But that suggested etymology is wrong too. It may be, or rather may have been secret, but no matter: it still fails the tests that render it a fully fledged language. What it is, perhaps, is a lexis of synonymy. There are themes: topics it embraces, the philosophy of its use (‘counter’ / ‘subversive’) but even if it demands dictionaries, it is not a language as such.

Yet with all that said, the diagram with which Sir James Murray, its first editor, prefaced the OED, setting linguistic groupings around a central core,  does equate slang with jargon / technical terms / dialect / etc. as equally valuable subsets of the over-riding ‘English language’. Even if Murray seems to mix the concepts of ‘vocabulary’ and language’.

The current OED offers this under language

Definition 1.a. The system of spoken or written communication used by a particular country, people, community, etc., typically consisting of words used within a regular grammatical and syntactic structure.

In that case, no. It is not a system. Nor, even if Victor Hugo wrote, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, of ‘the kingdom of argot’, and playwrights such as Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson rendered visible a ‘beggar’s brotherhood’, is it a community. But let us look further:

Definition 2. a. The form of words in which something is communicated; manner or style of expression

Then yes, slang is certainly that. And here the OED even cross-references to ‘slangism’ and ‘slanguage’

As such, it must come from somewhere. People demand that it should come from somewhere. It has creation myths. Like the Biblical original they are undoubtedly unsound. They involve a great leader and his community of criminal beggars and the establishment of codes both social and linguistic. In France it was le Grand Coesre, a word surely linked to Caesar, who gathers his followers and lays down the laws, including those of secret communication. In England it was one Cock Lorel, King of the Beggars, who performed the same office, bringing his people together at the pleasingly named Devil’s Arse Peak in Derbyshire. But since cock lorel means no more than what we would term a ‘top villain’, then this story must be just that: a story.

And if as I say slang is hard-wired, then the creation myths are just that: myths. Nonetheless the need for secrecy was genuine. The French term  argot denoted a people before it was a language (or rather jargon) and when it became a language, then it was for criminals only. In France, at least, this was probably true until the last world war: the milieu had its own lexis and it, as much as any street, delineated its boundaries. It was not the same as l’argot commun, the slang of civilian life. It is harder to see where cant, the criminal jargon of the underworld and the slang of the common user draw their lines in the Anglophone world. Cant dictionaries abounded, albeit plagiarizing relentlessly each from its predecessor, until the 19th century. But by the end of the 17th they were already being overlapped and the cant words that appear in volume after volume are estranged ever further from their original users. Today we all speak ghetto, black American, a by-product of rap’s world-conquering proliferation.

And then there is the job itself.

The lexicographer as Johnson informed us, tongue surely deep in cheek, is a harmless drudge. Maybe so when the research is in train, but when the dictionary appears and the world consults it, then the drudge has turned deity, somewhat tin-pot of course, but a deity whose commandments are heeded, nonetheless. I speak, of course, only for myself, but I wonder.

As slang lexicographers we are making a vast and complex concrete structure with no choice but to settle its foundations on sand – sometimes well-packed sand, sand that at its best can be moulded into a prize-winning castle that wows the beach, but otherwise shifting sand, at worst even quicksand with all its treacheries.

Such records that we have of early slang use are as frustrating as they are insufficiently informative. Slang was not a privileged discourse; slang was thus left largely unrecorded. The earliest material on which we draw is minimal, quite fragmentary. Some 13th century passion plays in France, a few terms in Chaucer or Piers Ploughman, the trial, in 1455, of the mendicant Coquillards in Dijon, the near incomprehensible poetry of Villon, the so-called ‘beggar books’ of 16th century Europe. In no sense is this a substantial record. And in nearly all cases these are examples of underworld jargons, of criminal codes rather than general slang. Yet the fact that records are relatively scanty in no way ‘proves’ that such codes had not existed, to take the UK as an example, priot to Robert Copland’s glossary of c.1535 or, as in Germany, the Liber Vagatorum of 1510. As for slang ‘proper’, France’s bas-langage, literally ‘low language’, slang as used by the butcher, the baker and their urban peers, the term does not even exist, at least as so far recorded in England, until 1756.

I do not care. That there are no records in no way ‘proves’ the language’s non-existence. I cannot ‘prove’ that I am right, but I believe that I am. I believe in a natural, even hard-wired human drift from conformity. In language as in other aspects of existence. The dictionary, which to the best of its writer’s ability, must deal with unimpeachable facts, cannot allow itself this luxury – and nor can I in making one. But in theory, if not in practice, I can and do.

Taking Slang Seriously (IV)

Lexicography might be represented as the great jigsaw puzzle. Constantly turning the bits until one fits another and gradually, so gradually, the picture emerges.

And like the accumulation of money for the very rich, who no longer need it, the amassing of a slang dictionary is no more than a means of ‘keeping score’. Or if one seeks an alternative image, slang lexicography – perhaps all lexicography – is an attempt to map a territory that remains fluid, shifting and in the end un-mappable. The lack of full and/or accessible records ensures that we must leave blank spaces on our maps. ‘Here Be Dragons’ or anthropophagi – or at least we hope so. But the ‘game’ will continue whether or not the score is maintained; the territory exists, mapped or otherwise. The interested world requires its guides.

But the slang dictionary, that shifting, unfinished scorecard, that map that can never fill in every territory, is inadequate in almost every way.

It stands as an authority, it displays itself as concrete, but it is clay from top to toe. It is made, after all, by human beings. It is incomplete – how else can it be when slang is in constant evolution? – it takes as its starting point an arbitrary date based on circumstances beyond lexicographical control. Its definitions may be correct but its dating almost invariably is not or at least very well may not be – governed as it has to be by the essential serendipity of research, however devotedly pursued. Its etymologies aim for pertinence, but are too often leaps in the dark, however inspired, and there is, there has to be at times, an admission (perhaps tacit) of guesswork. Its orthography, since of all languages slang remains the most resolutely oral, can be equally debatable. And despite that orality, a guide to its pronunciation is never even attempted. What the lexicographer knows and attempts to pass on to the reader exists only in the shadow of just how much he or she does not know.

None of which, however, in any way invalidates the dictionary’s supremely necessary existence. Nor that of the dictionary-maker’s job. But one must never forget that the great river it attempts to tame would and does flow on quite regardless.

So I wonder, who are we, myself and my fellow slang lexicographers? Not many, that’s for sure. If I look at the canonical list, the primary collectors since 1535 when the first glossary appeared, what do I see? In the first place they all have a day job. Two printers, a magistrate, one dissolute playwright, one known only as a ‘Gent.’; one antiquary-cum-militia captain, one best-selling sporting journalist, one ‘beastly bloated booby’, as the corrupt chief of police in question was known, one publisher whose list combined pirated editions and flagellation pornography. A teacher of  French to Sandhurst cadets, one poet who derived his laughs from German immigrant mispronunciation and another  who gave us ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck’. And his co-author whose main interest was ectoplasm and the allied phenomena of spiritualism. A prison chaplain and his team of lifers. Not until 1937, in Eric Partridge, did a professional join the party.  And even he had really meant to be a publisher.

For all these lexicographers, usually male, middle aged, middle class, it is the great escape. Sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and never leave your desk. Even easier with the Internet. Anatomists of the underbelly cutting not into ripe cadavers but into riper language.  Dr Frankensteins sewing together our monster dictionaries and setting them free to wander in the name of our study-bound, data-dominated lives. Voyeurs of other people’s dramas. Flâneurs, to be kinder, in the thronging streets – some lit brightly, some less so – of slang’s vocabulary.

Nor are we merely voyeurs upon the sensational. Disinterested, unmoved,  we are heartless; we have no human interest. Nor human interest stories. Just words, words, words. The beggar is whipped, the whore has a back-story, the junkie dies. We do not care. Only if frustratingly, impudently, they remain mute.

We neither prescribe nor proscribe. We describe. The guilty appeasement of political correctness holds no sway.  We lay out the stall. It is up to the buyer to assess what they desire. We do not suggest, we do not advise.

But enough negatives. We are also craftsmen. Craftsman: a maker,  an artificer, inventor or contriver. One writes a dictionary, thus the direct translation of ‘lexicographer’, but one also makes it. The word is also synonymous with artist, when ‘artist’ implies a general sense of being skilled. I am one who has no physical skills, for whom the term cack-handed might well have been invented;  cooking aside, the plastic arts defeat me. Yet, and this is doubtless overly romantic, as I work on the dictionary I see invisible tools. A scalpel, to slice out extraneous matter, pliers to tug a miss-positioned citation and set it down in its proper place, files and planes to smooth the definitions, sandpaper to put on the finishing touches. The perfect lemma – the entirety of a single headword and all that pertains to it – should display the same elegance as a perfect item of furniture. I would not dare suggest that all my efforts are so successful, but sometimes, especially with a ‘big’ word, such as hot with its 40 columns of definitions, of sub-definitions, of derivations, compounds and phrases, there is a sense of having made something not just of words, but in some way a physical, tangible and most important of all, a useable object.

So is it absurd to be, as of course I am, so proud of something so generally disdained, or worse: rarely even noticed but for its least important content.

I began or almost so, with Freud. Since among the next books I want to write is one that deals with French as well as English slang, let me end with a somewhat free translation of a French authority. The veteran lexicographer Alain Rey.

On croit que l’on maîtrise les mots, mais ce sont les mots qui nous maîtrisent.

As lexicographers believe that we master the words. We are wrong. It is the words that master us.