In 2000, I published a book of words and phrases drawn from a lifetime’s obsession with the language of vintage crime fiction, film noir, jazz, blues, hillbilly, rockabilly and rock’n’roll music. One example of this kind of change has a personal resonance for me. Indeed, the word “hip” itself only became hip after its predecessor, “hep”, fell out of favour, as noted by Blossom Dearie in the song I’m Hip (1966): “When it was hip to be hep, I was hep”. One obvious drawback for the slang user is that often the hip word of today turns unexpectedly into the embarrassingly square word of tomorrow.
Ageing jazzers were probably choking on their berets listening to Simon and Garfunkel in The 59th Street Bridge Song (1966) singing about “feeling groovy”, as a once exclusive in-word suddenly flooded the airwaves. Twenty years later, it was as mainstream as they come, co-opted by every branch of the media – so that today it is routinely taken for a 60s term. Groovy was the hip new jazz word of the early 1940s, batted around by bebop musicians and pulp novelists. Much slang starts out as a kind of low-level guerrilla warfare directed at straight society, designed to keep out the squares, or annoy them, and is then abandoned by the originators once the words have become common currency. To that end, the school put up signs that read: In October 2013, a London academy attempted to outlaw the use of certain slang words and phrases among its pupils, to help them perform well at interviews for universities and jobs. Whether it goes to work or not, people have often determined that slang should be kept out of school. The poet Carl Sandburg defined slang rather more poetically as “language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands and goes to work”.ġ8th century slang-collector Francis Grose. The American lexicographer Noah Webster dismissed it in his original 1828 dictionary as “low vulgar unmeaning language”.
Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s first Labour prime minister, declared in 1925 that using slang in conversation was the mark of “decadent minds”, and that such talk “murders truth itself”. Of course, slang has always had its detractors.
#Dictionary of slang 1960 series
It is all right to publish these terms in a book – or deploy a magnificent variety of them in an award-winning series such as The Sopranos – but try uttering any of them on social media and see how far that gets you. Many of the historical sayings documented in my book – such as referring to a modern-day sex worker by the 13th century term, soiled dove, or employing a 200-year-old name for a gay man, backgammon player – would now be unacceptable to someone or other online, busily taking offence on behalf of everyone else. Having spent the past four years writing a history of English slang, it gradually became clear to me that the digital age is altering slang: both the way it evolves and is spread, and attitudes towards it. Bawdy, mocking, occasionally brutal, superbly inventive and yet somehow overwhelmingly good-hearted, it helped fuel my interest these past 30-odd years in the language of everyday people – not as heard in drawing rooms or public orations, but late at night three sheets to the wind, or dodging shells in the trenches, when circumstances call for choice expressions that sum things up or cut them down. First published in 1785, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue remains for me the single most important slang collection of them all. Somewhere in my early 20s, I stumbled across a cheap secondhand reprint of a book by an 18th-century Londoner named Francis Grose, which recorded the everyday speech of the people he encountered in the low drinking dens, bagnios and rookeries around Covent Garden and St Giles. My father, who grew up in the council estates of Slough during the second world war, knew slang words for most situations, good and bad, which I would hear regularly around the house as a child.