The book that brought out the Lady Bracknell in me

I’ve always said that speech is my second language, so naturally I’m somewhat slang-shy; I love words all written down properly and punctuated to within an inch of their lives. Not so Jonathon Green, who has the same relationship with slang as Jordan does with eating wedding cake in a thong; five books about it published and another one in the pipeline. According to Wikipedia, Green is often referred to as ‘the English-speaking world’s leading lexicographer of slang’, and has even been described as ‘the most acclaimed British lexicographer since Dr Johnson’.

I’ve got a bit of a problem — or ‘beef’ — with people (generally public-school men, like Green) who make a life’s work and a handsome living by taking something vibrant, ephemeral and working-class and turning it into something stodgy, academic and respectable; inevitably, there’s a suspicion that they’re slumming it as surely as any daft deb in 1920s Harlem sniffing crushed aspirin and declaring the jazz band ‘to die for!’ But there is some good stuff here.

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For instance, did you know that long before ‘gay’ meant homosexual, it actually meant, when used of a woman, ‘loose’? ‘No gentleman would think of calling a lady of his acquaintance, however hilarious she might be in disposition, a gay woman,’ huffed one Colonel Prideaux way back in 1889. So much for the righteous knicker-twisting of right-wing tabloid tattlers — HANDS OFF OUR INNOCENT G-WORD! — which I remember from the last century.

And the original meaning of ‘tit’ was ‘fool’ rather than ‘breast’, which reminded me that ‘boob’, too, does double duty on this front, as when the Democrat wit remarked upon the election of John Warner, Republican senator and the then Mr Elizabeth Taylor, ‘Looks like Virginia just elected the three biggest boobs in the country!’

There’s so little humour in this book that it makes your eyes cross with sheer molten boredom.