Who gave slang a bad name?

The rich and complex history of slang demonstrates how we have always felt the need to express all that is raw

When it was pointed out to him that the reference he’d made in one of his poems to a ‘nun’s twat’ constituted a gross indelicacy, to say the least, Robert Browning was flabbergasted. He confessed that he had no idea that ‘twat’ meant what in those Victorian times—when legs of pianos could not be mentioned in polite company— might euphemistically be called a woman’s ‘private parts’, adding that he always fancied that the word referred to some sort of ‘headgear’ worn by members of a convent.

Poor Browning. He wouldn’t have committed such a solecism had he had the advantage of consulting Jonathan Green’s authoritative work on slang words and other forms of so-called ‘bad language’ which constitute the subtext—or sometimes the super-text—of our everyday communication, both spoken and written.

Green is at pains to point out that he is not a linguist but a lexicographer—a collector and tabulator of words—and his book is a picaresque narrative of what he calls the ‘film noir of language’, the visceral words which come from the gut— or the gutter—and which add punch to our expressions. He defines slang as a ‘counter-language’, a language that subverts and says ‘no’ to the conventions of the day; it is the language not of the fashionable salon or elegant drawing room, but the parlance of the streets, the pavement ‘poetry of the poor’. With reference to the subtitle of his book, Green emphasises that his use of the word ‘vulgar’ comes from the Latin ‘vulgus’ for ‘the crowd’, or ‘the people’.

Green traces the recorded origins of slang to the Arab world of the 10th century, safely distant from the censorious and ‘limiting obscurities of omnipresent Christianity’. What has come to be called slang began as a criminal argot, a codified trade talk, devised by beggars, vagabonds and petty thieves to avoid detection by eavesdropping authority. This verbal underbelly was constitutionally inclined to coin words and expressions which, both literally and metaphorically, hit below the belt and alluded to sexual organs or acts, or to the evacuation of bodily wastes. For example, ‘fart’ could be both a verb and a noun, referring to an unlikeable or ‘windy’ person. Similarly ‘arse’ came to mean an unpleasant individual as well as a part of the anatomy.

As slang was a secret language, a subaltern lexis, the historian of slang faces the problem that there are few if any archival records relating to its early roots. Indeed, the English word ‘slang’ itself has a conjectural etymology. Green tracks the story of slang to 1758, citing a pamphlet called ‘A Plan for a Hospital for Decayed Thief-takers’ which contains the sentence: ‘The master who teaches them must be well versed in the cant language, commonly called the Slang Patter, in which they should by all means excel.’ The pamphlet attributes the original manuscript to a Jonathan Wild, who was hanged in 1725 in London, apparently for receiving stolen goods, while the printer signs himself ‘Henry Humbug’. Like a stealthy thief in the night, slang masks its narrative with secrecy.

Compilers of dictionaries and other word-sleuths have suggested that the story of slang is as old as civilisation itself. Green quotes John Camdem Hotten’s Slang Dictionary, published in 1859, in which the compiler notes: ‘the “fast” men of buried Nineveh… may have cracked Slang jokes on the steps of Sennarcherib’s palace; and the stones of Ancient Egypt, and the bricks of … Babylon may, for aught we know, be covered with slang hieroglyphics unknown to modern antiquarians’.

Slang’s up-yours attitude to all officialdom earned it more than its fair share of critics and expurgators. Though established writers like Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope used slang terms in their works, as had Shakespeare and Chaucer much earlier, Victor Hugo attacked such usage as ‘an odious phraseology grafted on the general language, like a hideous excrescence… Misfortune is dark and crime is darker still, and it is of these two darknesses put together that argot is composed’.

However, Hugo’s compatriot, Emile Zola, turned argot, or ‘langue populaire’—the ‘popular language’ or language of the people—into what Green calls the ‘cornerstone of literary realism’. For his pains, Zola had his works banned in Britain for ‘immorality’, and the publisher of his works in English translation was put behind bars. The war between ribaldry and repression had begun.

Green quotes the lexicographer John F Genung who in 1893 wrote ‘slang is to a people’s language what an epidemic disease is to their bodily constitution … Like a disease, too, it is severest where the sanitary conditions are most neglected’. In his book Progressive English (1918), James C Fernold thundered his own broadside against this alternative diction: ‘Slang … saves the trouble—and the glory—of thinking. The same cheap word or phrase may be used for any one of a hundred ideas … Slang is the advertisement for mental poverty’.

So, is slang in fact the spoken equivalent of a labour-saving device, breeding mental and verbal laziness? Or is it like a Swiss army knife, capable of multi-purpose and inventive usage? It depends on your point of view, or rather, the point you wish to make with your vocabulary.

Though Green does not mention it in his book, there is a telling anecdote about Rajneesh, the Indian ‘godman’, who later called himself Osho. When asked by a disciple what he thought of the word ‘fuck’, the self-styled sage of sexuality replied, without batting an id, that it was the most beautiful, expressive and versatile word in the English language. It could be used as a noun, or as a verb, both transitive and intransitive. Suffixed with ‘about’, it meant to play around or dally. Followed by ‘off’, it was an injunction to go away. It could be used as a participial adjective to connote exhaustion. Or as a simple adjective expressing scorn or contempt, or, on the other hand, great approbation. It could be utilised both as an adverb or adjective to denote a superlative, or as an expression indicative of surprise, consternation, delight, wonder, anger, disgust, dismay, elation and discovery. It could also be used as a purely meaningless qualification, merely for the heck of it.

What is the genealogy of this most-used four-letter word in the English language? Green tends to disagree with those who have suggested that the word derives from the Italian ‘futuo’, ‘used specifically with a client copulating with a whore’, and suggests instead a derivation from ‘fottuere’, also of Italian origin, which a 16th century Anglo-Italian lexicographer, John Florio, gave as one of his synonyms for the Anglo-Saxon term, the French equivalent being ‘foutre’. Playing it safe, the magisterial Oxford English Dictionary begs the question with a terse ‘Origin unknown’.

Despite its long, if obscure, lineage and its common usage in everyday speech, the f-word remained taboo in print, with rare exceptions such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which with its self-consciously pedagogic naming of body parts and their functions reads like a biology textbook for middle-school children. As late as 1948, in his Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer had to resort to the three-letter substitute of ‘fug’ for the real four-letter McCoy.

But the ramparts of prudery—the bastion of the archetypal censor, Miss Grundy, who would enforce a chastity belt on language to protect its illusory virginity—were rapidly being breached by writers like Henry Miller and William Burroughs who sang the body electric, playing their dark music on the hidden chords of the libido. The 300,000-odd fans who flocked to the open-air music festival at Woodstock, USA, chorused the anthem of the Age of Aquarius when they followed the lead of the singer who urged them to give him an ‘Eff’, a ‘You’, a ‘See’, and a ‘Kay’, and they thundered their response, blowing the socks of Miss Grundy.

However, while the f-word has proved to be what might be called one of the ‘hardy perennials’ of slang, weathering many changes of years and seasons, many if not most slang expressions wither away with time, to be replaced by new terms. To be at the cutting edge of language, slang has to constantly reinvent itself.

Green traces the evolution of this parallel language through medieval England; the slave plantations of the southern states of America; the two World Wars; the growing politicisation of the American college campus, particularly during the Vietnam War; and Afro-American gangsta rap and Ebonics, which some claim is a distinct language by itself, with a vocabulary totally impenetrable by the uninitiated.

But, as Green notes, even when it shrouds itself in secrecy, English slang has always been a promiscuous strumpet. The approximately 125,000 terms and phrases the author has collated on his database can be traced to no fewer than 19 languages, starting with French, Italian and German, and including Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Hindi (thanks largely to the British Raj and Kipling), Yoruba and Zulu.

Green concludes with the observation: ‘Slang long since took to itself the lexis of humanity’s emotional and social downside. Our less admirable but absolutely unavoidable selves… It has always been needed. It still is. It always will be.’

Slang is spontaneous; it is extempore. Slang is what happens when language breaks into jazz. Green plays an accomplished riff to that catchy rhythm. Which is what makes his book such a fucking good read. Or, for the sake of any residual Grundys still out there, a fugging good read.

Jonathan GreenLanguage! 500 Years of the Vulgar Tongue