After more than a decade's labour, Jonathon Green, lexicographer of the subversive, has produced as fine a three-volume dictionary of slang as you would desire to piss upon (1700: phrase meaning "excellent, first-rate"). Like the OED, it is built on "historical principles", with dates for citations, impressing upon us the boisterous demotic creativity of our forebears, who were no less interested than we are in making up new ways to describe getting drunk (1650: "go to the scriveners and learn to make indentures").
It is surprising to learn how old some current slang is: you could keep someone posted in 1864, and "put up or shut up!" goes back at least to 1873 gambling dens. The boys who admired my "hard" jacket on the Tube the other week were probably no more aware than I was that this usage to mean "excellent" or "fashionable" dates from at least 1936.
Slang, Green argues in his introduction, is a language "of marginality and rebellion, of dispossession and frustration". The great themes here are sex, death, religion, alcohol and intense dislike of other people, which is to say the great themes of all literature. It can be faintly disheartening to come across yet another word bigging up the penis as a weapon of violence (there are 1,000 of them, Green says), but there are also many obscure beauties: exflunct ("to destroy or overwhelm"), taradiddler ("a petty liar"), or the splendid puddlejumper ("an excitable person").
One marvels too at the variety of usages to which a single word has been put: a "growler" has been a dog, a four-wheeled cab, a whisky-flask, a toilet, the vagina and food. And consider the nuanced spectrum of "get" phrases including get off, get off with, get off on, tell someone where to get off, get her!, get you!, get down with your bad self, and, of course, get fucked (the last to be pronounced while giving someone the hairy eyeball).
Such a mammoth work must inevitably contain slips: I doubt that "geeky", in a quoted newspaper article's description of "a geeky guy with silly facial hair", was intended to mean "unattractive" exactly; and Green has "bare" in modern yoofspeak meaning "many, lots of", though it can also mean simply "very" (I overheard a girl last week admitting sweetly: "My mum's bare nice to me"). Meanwhile, "long" in the sense of boring or unpleasant seems to have been missed altogether.
This is forgivable since slang is such a fast-moving target, of which any snapshot will be instantly out of date. In this day and age, perhaps the business of producing printed reference books is, anyway, all holiday at Peckham (1788: "all over, finished, hopeless"). Green says that he intends "to render the material available electronically", which would be very useful for performing reverse lookups: once one has found "to feel like a boiled owl", one instantly wants to collect other similarly vivid phrases for being hungover, just in case they come in useful one day.
Nowhere in Green's pages will you be shown a word only to be told it "doesn't exist", which paradoxical judgment is the domain of language police rather than language herders. As cant cops go, the guardians of the Guardian's own style guide are more forgiving and much wittier than most (ruefully quoting mistakes from this very paper), though they veer somewhat unpredictably between two flavours of normativity: the pragmatic and local (what is right for the Guardian), and the universal (what is right tout court).
This tension reflects the dual nature of the publication: it is an internal rulebook for working hacks, but also sold as a writing guide for the general reader. Many entries are simply helpful facts for the toiling subeditor (spellings of placenames; names of Spice Girls or Tory prime ministers). On the other hand, there is an excellent section of very nicely turned grammar and punctuation heuristics: essentially a less annoying Lynne Truss in a bottle. Of universal interest, too, ought to be the admirable thread of caution about the political implications of vocabulary (eg: "We should not take [. . .] use of the word [reform] at face value"), with coolly sensible entries for "terrorism" or the language of illness. (In turn, some might object to the use here of "mainland China", which just goes to show that the price of such sensitivity is eternal vigilance.)
No such volume can be impregnably armoured against the determined pedant. The plural of court martial is given as "courts martial" yet "attorneys general" is not only disallowed but ridiculed. Meanwhile, anyone trying to understand the Guardian's rules for capitalisation ("Nazi but nazism"; "information commissioner but Information Commissioner's Office") will, I fear, end up not knowing whether to shit or buy gas (1973: "an expression of total confusion").
As for new-minted words or usages, it is the rare style guide that can resist an absolutist urge to put its foot down. And so it is written here that "there is no such word as 'denialist'", though evidently there is now such a word (80,000 Google results as I write): it's just that we at the Guardian don't approve of it. The reader is instructed, too, that "gift" is "not a verb", though at my local Starbucks there is an exciting poster informing me that their coffee is "perfect for gifting". I'm pretty sure that means "gift" now is a verb, whatever anyone thinks about it. Does common usage, the vital urge to slangify so majestically celebrated in Green's dictionary, eventually steamroller even the most well-founded objections of style guardians? Do beavers piss on flat rocks?
