What other job lets you swear in front of your parents?

There aren’t many jobs that allow a nice middle-class Jewish boy to say ‘fuck’ in front of his parents. But Jonathon Green found one: compiling slang dictionaries. This memoir of a life spent exploring the grubby margins of the English language reveals plenty about both that language and Green himself. When a man loves reading so much that he does it even while brushing his teeth, material won’t be lacking.

The ‘parents’ line is Green’s stock reply to the ‘why did you choose your job’ question. But the analysis goes deeper. ‘That Jew thing’, as he calls it, features heavily. ‘Oven-dodger’, meaning someone who escaped the Nazis, is one of just two entries in his 125,000-strong database that make him wince (you really don’t want to know the other). Green’s only-child status further bolstered his ‘outsider’ credentials: ‘Lexicography is a passport to non-participation … getting as far away as possible from the messiness of the world but at the same time arrogantly setting oneself up as one of its arbiters.’