Charlotte Brontë liked to let her hair down linguistically from time to time. In an unpublished piece of early fiction, she imagines a scene at a horse race in which the owner of the defeated favorite suspects that his horse was doped. Ned Laury introduces an underworld informer, Jerry Sneak—the man who interfered with the horse—but demands: “Who’ll provide the stumpy, the blunt, the cash as it were to pay for the liquor that cousin of mine will require before he peaches?”
This kind of “flash” slang was doubtless not what the Brontë family used at tea in Haworth parsonage; but it was disseminated through magazine articles that offered readers a vicarious taste of vulgar vocabulary. Modern viewers of Mafia movies who, in turn, pepper their conversation with references to people being “whacked” by “wiseguys” in the “waste management business” are engaged in the same verbal tourism.
But what counts as slang? Where does it come from? And why does it exert such a powerful hold on the middle–class imagination? Jonathon Green sets out to answer these questions in the course of charting the development of slang as it is recorded in literature, from medieval beggar-books to World War II soldiers’ pornography.
Perhaps appropriately, “slang” has proved a slippery word for dictionary-makers to trace. As Green points out, although the word is used in a variety of contexts from the 1750s to mean “a line of work,” “nonsense,” and as a verb, “to swindle” or “to banter with,” no formal attempt was made to pin down its origins until 1859, and no etymology has been proven. It may derive from Scandinavian languages: In Norwegian, sleng means “an invention, device, strategem,” and a slengjenamm is a nickname; in Swedish, slanger means “to gossip.” The notion of “slinging” as “throwing” may also be relevant: slang as a set of words hurled into the world. Nobody really knows.
Green, however, has a strong view of where slang originates and why. It is, in his view, a product of the city. It can absorb dialect words and those of professional jargons, but its role is distinct. Slang, he argues, exists as a counter-language, a “language that says no.” It is necessarily oppositional to “standard English” and is spoken to reinforce a community that needs to express itself, often in coded fashion, in a vocabulary that signals its disregard for polite norms.
Some of the earliest written records we have of slang are in books that profess to warn the reader against the cant used by professional criminals and false beggars to evade detection by law-abiding citizens. This genre of book flourished between the 14th and the 16th centuries and endured in various guises into the modern era. Travelers were warned to be on their guard against the Prigman, who walked with a stick in his hand “like an idle person,” but used his implement to steal drying clothes from hedges; the Abraham Man, who feigned madness in order to solicit financial aid; and the Courtesy-man, who inveigled his way into victims’ homes, helping himself to their property. The wary were also alerted to “moochers” (petty thieves), and the strategems used by prostitutes and their pimps to “cross-bite” their targets, encouraging the punter to pay for his pleasure before appearing in the guise of an enraged father or brother to beat and rob him.
One of the questions such books raise is whether the slang they “record” was, in fact, accurate or wholly invented by the author. Hypocrisy is written into the fabric of the text—the “warning” against roguery is clearly also an invitation to the reader of higher social standing to participate imaginatively in the criminal conversation, to be thrilled by its threat and titillated by its rudeness. Having such words in our own mouths (whether voiced or not) is a way of being tickled by the roughness of someone else’s tongue, of shivering at the lewdness and violence of their whisper in our own ears.
Though guides to thieves’ cant were gradually replaced by 19th-century accounts of “flash” language, the two-faced attitude to slang that they display remained typical. Charles Dickens, in Oliver Twist (1838), used some 200 slang terms to give Fagin’s den the feel of a real underworld hideout. Readers reveled in this language; copies of the book circulated even among real pickpockets. But Oliver, despite growing up in the workhouse, is never allowed to use a slang expression; as a born gentleman, he instinctively speaks purely. It is the proof of his incorruptible innocence. In his magazine Household Words, Dickens published an essay on slang, probably by George Augustus Sala. The 1853 article expressed the view that either slang should be “banished, prohibited” or that there should be a New Dictionary that would
In this intriguing simile, slang words stand in for the urban poor themselves: They need to be expurgated or assimilated.
Green shows that in the 19th century, America and Australia both took a more positive view of slang than Britain did. Dickens mocked the vulgar nature of American newspapers by satirizing them as “the New York Sewer, the New York Stabber, the New York Plunderer, and the New York Keyhole Reporter.” But the American popular press, particularly in its court reports, was a creative medium for representing the irreverent voices of a diverse population. It gave us expressions such as the “Bible Belt,” “blurb,” the “Chicagorilla” (gangster), the “cliffhanger,” the “hick,” the “goofball,” and the “pushover.” Walt Whitman, an avid slang collector, observed that “language is . . . like some vast living body. . . . And slang not only brings the first feeders of it, but is afterward the start of fancy, imagination and humor, breathing into its nostrils the breath of life.”
America’s greater tolerance for the genius inherent in grassroots language may well explain why its literature, from Mark Twain to Philip Roth, is better connected to the “workingman” as a speaking subject rather than as an object of anxiety. In the 21st-century world, where informal oral media (TV, film, YouTube) shape global discourse, it is American slang that has “gone the distance.”
Green offers us 18 broadly chronological chapters on the history of slang. Some of these chapters focus on particular forms where slang is to be found (e.g., “The Stage and the Song”), others on particular speech communities (Australia, America, African Americans), others on recurrent themes (sex, sports, war). There is much here of interest, yet it must be confessed that the material is sometimes drier than such a lubricious subject would lead one to anticipate. Green has elsewhere written explicitly for the popular market: He is responsible for such tomes as The Big Book of Filth (1999), The Big Book of Bodily Functions (2001), and the Dictionary of Insulting Quotations (1997). Here, however, he is writing as a lexicographer for an academic press, and some of these chapters make dense reading for anyone who does not have a scholarly interest in the development of vernacular language.
Green’s method is to cite sources (authors, books) rich in recorded slang and to discuss their place in the development of the glossary of what we know (or assume) to have been slang patter across the years. These sources can involve fascinating micro-narratives, as when we are introduced to characters such as John Taylor (1578-1653), the “Water-Poet,” a writer who had made his living as a boatman and traded on this to make a literary splash. Long before the days of Amazon, he became a successful pioneer of self-publishing, largely through publicity stunts designed to attract readers’ interest. He would plan a journey—to Prague, or on foot from London to Edinburgh with no money—and then seek sponsorship to undertake the trip and write about it. He produced at least 150 works, liberally larded with loose language.
However, for the nonspecialist, the effect of riding Green’s slang railroad through 18 different territories is sometimes tiring: One looks out of the window at passing scenery that is perhaps not so very different from that of the valley before. Indeed, the author himself remarks that one of the features of slang is the consistency of its preoccupations. A professor studying current student slang found that the leading thematic categories were: intoxication by drink or drugs (17.46 percent), terms of approbation (15.23 percent), romance, sex, and related body parts (12.06 percent), and insults and terms denoting misfits (11.42 percent). The focus of youthful banter has not changed much since the days when Bertie Wooster described drunken chums as “oiled,” “primed,” “squiffy,” “wozzled,” and “illuminated.”
One of the more illuminating pleas-ures of this book is discovering that some slang expressions still used today are ancient: “Dead as a doornail” and “daffy,” meaning eccentric, both date from the 14th century. There are also the expressions that, despite their admirably graphic qualities, have slipped away. “Pancake turner” was an early synonym for “disc jockey,” and “cellar smeller” in the 1920s referred to the kind of young man (still extant) who turns up at parties only to drink the host’s wine. There are some unpleasant surprises, too. It is, historically, all too evident that slang concerning the female genitals is driven by fear—they are the “bite,” “snatch,” “man-trap,” “snapping-turtle,” and “horror-bag”—while slang for their male counterpart is often driven by wishful thinking: “yard,” “bazooka,” “kingo,” “machine,” and “sugar-stick.”
On the whole, one is struck by the creative energy that flows through the human desire to speak “bad” language and the mixed motives that lead those who do not share that vocabulary to try to gather, analyze, and preserve it. Slang in literature is like the blue note in jazz—a note that gives
the standard tonality a dissonant frisson, a kink upwards or downwards, whose dirty slur adds color and verve to the cadences of polite language. Reading this book, one can celebrate those who brought slang out of the basement bar and into the recording studio, while at the same time recognizing that the true sound of its street music remains forever up in the air.
Sara Lodge, a senior lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, is the author of Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics.
