Review: Language! 500 Years of the Vulgar Tongue, by Jonathon Green

Imagine a field of English scholarship driven for 500 years by a smallish procession of pundits sitting mainly outside the academy. That’s slang studies for you.

My first warning about this book is: frequent coarse language and sexual references. My second is, it could become a classic of English studies.

Its author, the Englishman Jonathon Green, is a foremost collector and scholar of English-language slang. His 125,000-term slang database poured into his 2010 Dictionary of Slang. Now he turns his hand to an epic history of slang, “the city’s language … the ‘counter-language’ that says ‘no’.”

Like slang or loathe it, you may as well get used to it. It has always been there as the “lexis of humanity’s emotional and social downside, our less admirable but absolutely unavoidable selves”. Not merely a defiant refuge for the inarticulate or marginalised, it is also “witty, creative … vicious, cruel … funny, fun”.

Green harks back to the slangy terms of Latin. Fast-forwarding to the late 1300s, he finds in Chaucer early instances of English “slang”. Yet no such term was then used. By the 1500s, the “canonical” obscenities are appearing in print, including the one Joy Burch retweeted about Christopher Pyne. “Beggar books” begin to chronicle the “cant” vocabulary of vagrants and criminals. Characteristically, the author is game to name his top four lexicographers of this nascent 1500s slang. Then as now, he sees the study of slang as a job for a “few dedicated individuals”.

Joining their ranks, in the closing chapter on war slang, are three Australians. Two compile the first books of World War I slang. The third documents Duntroon’s misogynistic cadet-speak. As Green has already said in his 1600s-1800s section, “slang is a man-made language” that likes to keep women in their place.

This satisfying central portion ushers in the first real slang dictionary, of 1698. More playwrights and novelists appropriate the street argot, whether with Shakespeare’s spirit or slumming it like Dickens. London becomes a “centre of crime” where particular neighbourhoods nurture criminals and their cant. Slang-laden “prison pamphlets” decorate the 1600s, despite the execution of a couple of their authors. By the 1700s, journalists have joined the many writers on the “vulgar tongue”. Yet the satirist Jonathan Swift frowns on it, while Samuel Johnson excludes it from his landmark dictionary.

Slang also goes “civilian” over the 1700s. A variant called “flash” even goes chic, linking “dissolute members of the upper classes and the language of the proles”. Green esteems the 1785 slang dictionary by classically educated Francis Grose, the first to log durable terms like “birthday suit”, “chop and change”, “shag” and “slag”. Into the 1800s, Green’s preferred slang lexicographers remain, like himself, non-academics. John Hotton is the first to offer etymologies. John Farmer and W.E. Henley add proper historical citations.

As Australian and American slang arises in the 1800s, Green supplants his England-based chronology with more of a thematic approach.

He shows Australian convicts importing “flash” language, but soon changing meanings (“lag” and “swag”) or adding new terms. Nodding at the obligatory “sheila”, “larrikin” and “digger”, he moves on to the rich slang repository of the early Bulletin magazine. Key lexicographers and popularisers of Australian slang roll by. Standouts are Nino Culotta, of They’re a Weird Mob fame, and Barry Humphries, whose Barry McKenzie character spewed sordid synonyms for “vomit”. While this chapter lauds the inventiveness of our slang, I do wonder if we’re resting on our laurels. Another Englishman, Tony Thorne, has found few new Australianisms for his latest Dictionary of Contemporary Slang.

The “unswervingly racist” early Bulletin matches the “aggressive racism” of early American slang. Even for Green, then, slang is not all beer and skittles. He’s none too impressed by America’s banal “crackerbox philosophers” of the 1820s, or the 1850s novelist who affects slang for “titillated middle-class eyes”. But America too has its estimable 19th century slang collectors, including former policemen. The poet Walt Whitman has a cameo, enthusing over slang’s “lawless germinal element”.

Green reconsiders Eric Partridge, the New Zealand-born Briton and great 20th century savant of slang. While reaffirming Partridge’s commanding stature, he marks him down for his imprecise scholarship and avoidance of Americanisms. Green himself underscores the 20th century as the “American Century” for slang.

Before World War II, he has white journalists and novelists leading the American charge. He highlights the showbiz slang of  Walter Winchell and Variety magazine, and the crime writers or pulp novelists who retailed mobster slang for “middle-class voyeurs”. Although doubting their artistic credentials, he can’t deny their effect in breaking down the barriers between low slang and mass culture.

The 1960s hippies are typed as borrowers of black slang who invent little of their own. They scarcely disrupt the rise of black and rap slang. Green notes that (derogatory) slang was originally about, rather than by African-Americans, likewise for homosexuals. An exception is “white trash”, apparently an early 19th century black coinage aimed at whites. By the mid-20th century, there exist glossaries for “jazz” or “hepster” talk, as white Americans embrace black music and speech.

In our time, Green represents “the mass use of rap slang” as “state of the art” for the African-American crossover into white culture. No longer secret lower codes to be disdained by the uppers, rap and other slangs are “seamlessly and transparently incorporated” in English writing. Thankfully, Green himself employs a seamless kind of Standard English, albeit with a few forays into quite obscure corners of literary history.