Slang is language with its sleeves rolled up and its necktie loosened. Or, to quote Jonathon Green, the man Martin Amis once dubbed “Mr Slang”, it is “the language that says ‘no’. No to piety, to religion, to ideology and all its permutations, to honour, nobility, patriotism and their kindred infantilisms. It is forever Falstaff, never the Prince”. It is all those words we wouldn’t utter in a job interview or in front of a maiden aunt. And it is an endless source of pleasure, which explains why dictionaries of slang are so appealing.

In common with music and clothing, slang is subject to the vagaries of fashion. It puzzles us most when old or very recent, and, while antique slang can be satisfactorily covered in a printed volume, fire-new words cannot be. Anyone genuinely interested in getting to grips with the latest usage will today begin his or her search on the internet, and a dictionary of slang, although it may help a reader of Charles Dickens or Georgette Heyer, is a cabinet of curiosities and will tend to double up as a bathroom book or an ornament of the nightstand.

This may explain why the second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang has been given the strident title Stone the Crows. That word “modern” certainly needed nudging aside, for this is a book packed with terminology that looks decidedly whiskery – “Shylock”, “darky”, “Berkeley Hunt”. In their preface, the volume’s editors, John Ayto and John Simpson, explain that for present purposes “modern” means twentieth-century. Sixteen years having passed since the first edition, “around a thousand additional items . . . have found their way” into this one. “Found their way” seems a little relaxed, and that figure of “around a thousand” hardly sounds a lot. But let us enjoy some of the words new for this edition: “stud muffin”, “happy slapping”, “petrolhead”, “beer goggles”, “arm candy” and “builder’s bum”. Actually, we might be hard pressed to enjoy them. Perusing the new entries, it seems as though the past sixteen years have been rubbish – or rather, “minging”, “white-arsed”, “poxy”, “wack”.

The main innovation introduced for this edition is a thematic index. This, say Ayto and Simpson, “enables the user to track down slang expressions in a particular subject area, and also to gain an impression of those areas of human existence that are the most prolific engenderers of slang”. One scarcely needs the index to achieve this impression: no one will be surprised that there are an awful lot of pungent synonyms for the penis, having sex, dying, homosexuals, police officers, dislikeable people, insanity, money and drunkenness.

There is a great deal in Stone the Crows that will amuse and intrigue browsers. We may all know “sex kitten” and “shag”, but I suspect I am not alone in being tickled by the comparatively unfamiliar “liquorice-stick” (a clarinet), “stair-dancer” (a thief who steals from open buildings) or “pine drape” (a coffin).

Nevertheless, the book has some frustrating limitations. One of the familiar problems of dictionaries is that they do less than total justice to the expressive possibilities of a word. Succinctness is welcome in a definition, but there are times when it is achieved at the expense of full insight. Some of the definitions here seem minutely calibrated in ways that are not readily graspable.

Surprising omissions include “bare” (meaning “lots”), “brer” (a guy) and “creps” (trainers), all drawn from Jamaican patois and in common use among British teenagers. Yet we are told that “Claire Rayners” is rhyming slang for trainers, which seems like the kind of thing a Mockney (another word not present here) might venture in jest. Furthermore, although there is the inevitable large dose of drug vocabulary, I could not find a single reference to any of the slang connected with crystal meth, the past decade’s most aggressively modish stimulant. Acronyms are also missing. BF and OAO are included – both seem dusty – but there is no room for NSA, GSOH, VWE, LOL, or IMHO.

No dictionary, printed or otherwise, can be truly comprehensive. Ayto and Simpson describe the idea of a comprehensive dictionary of slang as “that lexicographic mirage”. But it is telling that Stone the Crows can miss so much out yet still find space for a close explanation of “ram”, a term used in Eton’s Field Game – albeit without the definition mentioning the Field Game or enlightening us about its use of the altogether less self-explanatory “rouge”. Moreover, the sexual connotations of “ram” are overlooked entirely.

“Bottler” is defined only as “(Something or someone) excellent”. But what of its now more common use to denote a coward? “Cheesy” is “Inferior, second-rate, cheap and nasty”, which surely fails to capture the complexity of a word that often has connotations of corniness and kitsch. The pejorative sense of “chief” – much employed in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – is not here. Nor is that peculiar and ominous contemporary sense of the verb “to wet”: “to stab”.

On the other hand, Jonathon Green’s Chambers Slang Dictionary, an expanded version of his earlier substantial works in the field, shows mastery of many domains. Now meeting the lexicographic ideal of “fully nested” entries, it covers around 85,000 words and phrases. In fact, this alarmingly large tome is only a prelude to what Green terms “my overriding work-in-progress”, a database of slang “on historical principles”. Still, it’s a doozie.

Whether one trawls the pages of Green’s dictionary or merely glances at them, rich discoveries are certain. A brisk selection cannot do the volume justice, but among the items that caught this reader’s attention were the curious expressions “to knap a jacob from a danna-drag”, meaning “to steal the ladder from a nightsoil cart in order to use it for burglaries”, and “to knock the dust off the old sombrero”, a vividly weird way of referring to oral sex. Among the most recent items are “to break off one’s math”, meaning to give a person one’s phone number, and the expression “Are your arms and legs painted on?”, to be directed at someone who is perceived as lazy. Other curios include “fang bandit”, apparently an Australianism for a dentist; “Mediterranean back”, another Australian item, used to denote a supposedly fake illness; “sour-apple quickstep”, meaning diarrhoea; “Ford car salesman”, a prison superintendent who promises reforms but never carries them out; “mutton-shunter”, an archaic term for a policeman who harries prostitutes, and, in the same neck of the woods (tee hee), “Fulham virgin”, a nineteenth-century term for a whore.

A confident authority percolates through the book’s pages, but for all his obvious excellence Green doesn’t always get things right. Immediately before “Fulham virgin” he lists “Fulham tractor” (“a sports utility vehicle”), but far more often this contraption is known as a “Chelsea tractor”. I doubt, moreover, that there would be widespread agreement that “Swedish” is a modern Americanism for “homosexual”, and the notion that “Jonathan Aitken” is rhyming slang for “eggs and bacon” is probably the result of a journalist’s small joke.

The more one rummages in these two volumes, the more one sees how quickly slang becomes dated. Not all slang is ephemeral, but its essential intimacy and spontaneity make it the most disposable kind of poetry. Carl Sandburg once opined that “Slang is the language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and goes to work”. But slang often doesn’t even get around to taking off its coat – and when it does, it is less likely to go to work than it is to lie down for a snooze, strum itself senseless, or collapse in the gutter.

John Ayto and John Simpson
STONE THE CROWS
Oxford dictionary of modern slang
Second edition
408pp. Oxford University Press. £10.99 (US $18.95).
978 0 19 954370 0

Jonathon Green
CHAMBERS SLANG DICTIONARY
1,520pp. Chambers. £30.
978 0 550 10439 7

Henry Hitchings’s most recent book, The Secret Life of Words: How English became English, is due to appear in paperback later this year.

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