Language! E-Book

Jonathon Green

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 832

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In this richly entertaining book, Jonathon Green traces the development of slang and its trajectory through society, and offers an impassioned argument for its defence. Beginning, at least in recorded terms, in the gutter and the thieves' tavern, and displayed only in a few criminological pamphlets, slang has made its way up and out: across social classes and into every medium. There is no doubt that slang deals with those areas of life that standard English often chooses to sidestep. Certainly, slang has many more synonyms for topics such as crime, drunkenness and recreational drug-taking, sexual intercourse and the parts of the body with which we conduct it (and a variety of other functions), for madness, stupidity, unattractiveness, violence, racism and nationalism. That, for the author, is its role and its charm. Often dismissed as 'bad' language or 'swear-words', slang, he argues, is a 'counter-language', the language that says no. Born in the street it resists the niceties of the respectable. It is language's film noir, its banana skin, its pin that pops pretention. It is neither respectable nor respectful. It can be cruel, it can also be inventive, creative and very often funny. It represents us at our most human. Language! is an exuberant and rewarding work that uncovers an oral history of marginality and rebellion, of dispossession and frustration, and it shows how slang gives a vocabulary and a voice to our most guarded thoughts.

Leseprobe

LANGUAGE!

Also by Jonathon Green

Green’s Dictionary of Slang

Chambers Slang Dictionary

Chasing the Sun

Slang Down the Ages

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Jonathon Green, 2014

The moral right of Jonathon Green to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84887-898-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-78239-379-5

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-84887-899-0

Printed in Great Britain.

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Richard Milbank, editor and friend

Contents

Preface

1

Introduction: Slang: A User’s Manual

2

In the Beginning: The Pre-History

3

Lewd, Lousey Language: Beggars and Their Books

4

Crime and Punishment: The Vocabulary of Villainy

5

Play’s the Thing: The Stage and the Song

6

The Sound of the City: No City, No Slang

7

Flash: This Sporting Life

8

Down Under: Larrikin Lingo

9

Sex in the City: The Agreeable Ruts of Life

10

Cockney Sparrers: Mean Streets and Music Halls

11

America: Pioneers

12

Keeping Score: Nineteenth-century Slang Lexicography

13

Gayspeak: The Lavender Lexicon

14

American Century: The Slang Capital of the World

15

African-American Slang: The Flesh Made Word

16

Campus and Counter-Culture: Teenage Skills

17

War: One Thing It’s Good For

18

Conclusion: As It Was in the Beginning

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Preface

This is a history of slang, the city’s language.

It is an under-discussed topic and with one exception1 the last book-length attempt to tackle that history came in 1933: the slang lexicographer Eric Partridge’s Slang To-day and Yesterday. In his case his researches were somewhat tentative, since he had yet to embark on the dictionaries that would make him the twentieth century’s leading collector of the language. I can offer no such excuse: what follows is drawn from thirty years of slang study, and for much of the purely lexical research I have extracted material from the twenty years of work amassed by myself and others in making the multi-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang (2010) and on my continuing expansion and improvement of the database that underpins it.

Linguists have not, in general, paused to look that hard at slang. I am not one and I cannot pretend to remedy that omission. What I offer is very much the story of the language, its development and proliferation, those who have used it in plays, novels, journalism and other forms of story-telling and media, and, where necessary, those who have, especially in its early days, kept it alive by collecting it into glossaries and then dictionaries.

Thus this is a lexicographer’s history, and in that I am following a tradition. Those few who have attempted to offer the history of the language have always been those who knew it first as practice, and collected the underlying history and devolved their theories afterwards. Without their dictionaries, in which such information appears as an introduction, we would know even less of the subject. What they and I offer is, one might say, a figurative ‘etymology’ of a whole lexis. The story not just of a single word or phrase, but of an entire vocabulary.

It is also the lexicographer-historian who has privileged access to the extent of slang, the sheer size of the lexis. As will be seen, that lexis is governed by a variety of dominant themes, and thus offers substantial areas of synonymy, but it cannot be made too clear that there is much more to the vocabulary than the misguided popular assumption that limits slang to a few dozen so-called obscenities and a page or two of rhyming slang. Standard English covers all the areas that does slang, but slang illumines them in unprecedentedly creative ways.

This is not the history of all slang – that is, every one of the near 120,000 words that make up a lexis that has been recorded for half a millennium, and from across the English-speaking world. Instead I have focused on certain strands that run through the word-list. If it can offer no other defining aspect, then slang offers a highly thematic vocabulary: sex both private and commercial; crime in all its aspects, bodily parts and functions, insults both person-to-person and racist/nationalist, drink and drugs … One can see these themes in embryo when slang was originally recorded, and they remain its staples today. Reading such examples as I have included, one can see them in every instance of use and collection. There are local differences – typically the different styles and stimuli in America or Australia – but the over-riding themes will always emerge. Slang represents humanity at its most human, and that is not fettered by borders. Were I to have essayed non-anglophone slangs, I am certain that nothing would have changed.

The book is based roughly on chronological development, but after the eighteenth century, with the gradual accretion of the home-grown slangs of Australia and the United States, and the emergence of special slangs such as those of the campus, this must to an extent be abandoned, since developments are running in parallel. I have also chosen, among other subject-specific enquiries — among them slangs of students, teenagers, and of homosexuality — to approach the vastly important subject of African-American slang by itself. That anglophone slang is now dominated by America, and especially black America, might be thought to return everything to a central track, but as is the case throughout, niche vocabularies have ensured that there are now many slangs on offer.

If the early centuries of slang’s recorded existence permit one to read most if not all of that limited roster of authors who allow its words into their work, initially as the criminal language cant and then expanding to include more general material, by the nineteenth century that aim has been defeated, and since then rendered a foolish dream. Even the long-term lexicographer can only hope to sample. And with the arrival of the on-line riches of the internet, even sampling becomes harder by the day. What I have attempted is to use literary and where pertinent social developments to give the slang vocabulary a backdrop. For that I have had to select, ever more so as time progresses. I have chosen exemplars and looked at them in detail, but I have no doubt that rivals could exist and that those rivals could be used to assert the same points. To me this persistent expansion is one of slang’s glories. Like the Chinese trickster Monkey, it remains irrepressible.

Slang’s trajectory has been social as well as linguistic. Beginning, at least in recorded terms, in the gutter and the thieves’ tavern, and displayed only in a few criminological pamphlets, it has made its way up and out: across classes and into every medium. If the iceberg was once almost wholly submerged, some kind of sociolinguistic global melting has spread its waters throughout the sea of general speech. Even if at its creative core there remains an irreducible minimum of consciously developed incomprehensibility. Slang, after all, is not intended for unfettered understanding. But that secrecy has also eroded: modern communications are simply too fast and too omnivorous of all forms of available information. And slang, once despised, has become alluring, sexy, ‘cool’. There is a need to know and thus to use. In language terms it remains a thing apart, but like cool itself, now wholly accessible.

For me slang represents in its preoccupations both the circus and the sewer, the unfettered pleasure principle and that which is consciously hidden and only shamefully revealed: the ‘dirty words’ as some would term them. Yet it remains as much a part of the English language as any other of its subsets. It is not standard, it has no wish to be, but it has a role to play and it is sustained and will continue to be used and to be invented. This is not its whole story – we have no concrete ‘beginning’ and while humanity thrives there is no reason for there to arrive an ‘end’ – but it is my hope that I have laid out a good representation of what we have.

Jonathon GreenLondon and Paris, 2013

1

Introduction:Slang: A User’s Manual

Slang: The Language That Says ‘No’

Slang, widely seen as ‘the language of streets’, is far harder to define than it is to use. There have been dozens of definitions, whether lexicographical, linguistic, or simply from those who want to pin down something so hugely popular, yet so elusive. It seems sensible, then, to turn to the people who throng those streets for the current version. This is what we find in Wikipedia,1 the distilled wisdom of the crowd:

Slang […] the use of informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker’s dialect or language. Slang is often to be found in areas of the lexicon that refer to things considered taboo (see euphemism). It is often used to identify with one’s peers and, although it may be common among young people, it is used by people of all ages and social groups.

There is nothing there to dispute. But there is much to add. The definitions found in works of reference are by their nature concise, pared to the bone. They do not deal in nuance. Let us, at the outset, add some suggestions.

Above all its functions, slang is a ‘counter-language’, the language that says no. Born in the street, it resists the niceties of the respectable. It is impertinent, mocking, unconvinced by rules, regulations and ideologies. It is a subset of language that since its earliest appearance has been linked to the lower depths, the criminal, the marginal, the unwanted or even persecuted members of society. It has been censored, ignored, shoved to one side and into the gutter from where it is widely believed to take its inspiration and in which it and its users have a home. It remains something apart, and for many that is where it should stay.

Yet slang is vibrant, creative, witty, and open to seemingly infinite re-invention. It is voyeuristic, amoral, libertarian and libertine. It is vicious. It is cruel. It is self-indulgent. It is funny. It is fun. Its dictionaries offer an oral history of marginality and rebellion, of dispossession and frustration. They list the words that have evolved to challenge those states. It is supremely human.

It subscribes to nothing but itself – no belief systems, no true believers, no faith, no religion, no politics, no party. It is the linguistic version of Freud’s id, defined by him as ‘the dark, inaccessible part of our personality […] It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.’2

Slang is urban. The countryside has region-based dialect, or did, as dialect has been eroding since the industrial revolution began moving former peasants off the farm into the factory. The history of slang is also the history of the urbanization of modern life as reflected in this influential subset of the language. One may suggest a simple rule: no city, no slang.

One need only look at the dictionary definitions of slang to see what it is that links the city and its language: the over-riding suggestion is of speed, fluidity, movement. The words that recur are ‘casual’, ‘playful’, ‘ephemeral’, ‘racy’, ‘humorous’, ‘irreverent’. The slang words themselves are twisted, turned, snapped off short, re-launched at a skewed angle. Some with their multiple, and often contrasting definitions seem infinitely malleable, shape-shifting: who knows what hides round their syllabic corners. It is a language that requires the city’s hustle and bustle, its rush, lights, excitement and even its muted (sometimes far from muted) sense of impending threat. Then there are the value judgements: ‘sub-standard’, ‘low’, ‘vulgar’, ‘unauthorized’. The word we are seeking is street. Street as noun, more recently street as adjective. The vulgar tongue. The gutter language.

Slang, it is often suggested, represents the users’ innate inarticulacy. Their inability to use standard language. Not so. The reality is that slang remains in a state of constant reinvention. Even if that reinvention is not coming from elite sources. It is harder now to argue that slang is a secret language, as was once undoubtedly true. The speed of modern information transfer makes that level of secrecy almost impossible. Nonetheless the need for a level of perceived secrecy remains: when a slang word is coined it may well enjoy a period, however brief, of ‘invisibility’. But once it has become ‘revealed’, then the immediate need is for re-coinage. A term may be ephemeral (though much slang is remarkably long-lived), but the imagery behind it, the great recurrent themes of the lexis remain the same.

Thus far an imagistic approach to a language, because if a means of communication is a language then slang is surely such, as much as any other subset – jargon, technicalities, regionalisms – a part of the over-arching English language. It is on equal terms with standard English, the language, traditionally, of the broadsheet press, the BBC news and other top-down communicators. Slang may be considered ‘worse’ than standard English and suffers such slipshod condemnations as ‘bad’ language or ‘swear-words’, but such dismissals spring from ignorance. Prejudice, not fact. In linguistic terms it is a cousin, a somewhat raffish and rackety one no doubt, but in no way a poor relation nor a black sheep. If it is scorned, the scorn is the product of fear and suspicion, and even, given slang’s wonderful inventiveness, of jealousy.

At the same time, if slang is to be positioned as an innately oppositional language, it is necessary to identify the established version against which it is opposed. The concept of standard English is not recorded in print until 1836 but its development is generally accepted as starting in the fifteenth century. And according to the historian Alfred C. Baugh, this language was essentially that as used by the power centres that focused on contemporary London. ‘It was the seat of the court, of the highest judicial tribunals, the focus of the social and intellectual activities of the country. To it were drawn in a constant stream those whose affairs took them beyond the limits of their provincial homes. They brought to it traits of their local speech, there to mingle with the London idiom and to survive or die as the silent forces of amalgamation and standardization determined. They took back with them the forms and usages of the great city by which their own speech had been modified.’3

It is now argued whether, as Baugh suggests, this development expanded via top-down osmosis, and encompassed both written and spoken language, or whether it was actively imposed through clerical and educational authorities using formal systems to spread a standard. In either case standard English became establishment English and literary English.

All this is widely and well attested. Such is not the case for slang. As will be seen in chapter 2, language that featured ‘vulgar’ themes – sex, parts of the body, defecation, commercial sex – existed and might already be found in the middle English (pre-1450) used by such as Chaucer, and must have continued on, but it cannot yet be listed as ‘slang’. It is simply what Baugh terms ‘vulgar or illiterate speech […] the language of those who are ignorant of or indifferent to the ideals of correctness by which the educated are governed’.4 It may well be that such words were in wide and popular use but they were rarely recorded and would certainly not have been included in standard speech or writing. Like the vocabularies of regional dialects, also excluded from the standard as London English took control, they were the losers, as it were, in the struggle. The difference, of course, is that slang was just as much a city speech; it was the source – the street rather than the court – that was then, and for centuries beyond, what mattered.

Slang may oppose standard English but it never abandons it. It rejects large areas of standard terms, notably those that move beyond concrete description to abstract conceptualizing, but it suborns a great deal. Like the mature poet, slang steals quite unashamedly and a breakdown of etymological roots shows that the majority of slang terms can be found in the standard dictionaries, but with their meanings turned, twisted and skewed, upside-down and inside-out, larded with a solid layer of irony or wit.

The Etymology of the Word ‘Slang’

Where – as a word – does slang come from? Before looking, however constrainedly, at what comprises this particular subset, what about the word itself? Does it remain what my great predecessor Eric Partridge called it: ‘that prize-problem word’?5

Although the currently accepted first use of the word in the context of language is dated to 1756, there is evidence through the 1740s of alternative senses, though all are underpinned by some idea of duplicity: a line of work (first found in 1741), nonsense (1747) and, as a verb, to cheat, to swindle, to defraud (1741) and to abuse or banter with (1749). There is also ‘A Plan for a Hospital for Decayed Thief-Takers’, a document attributed to the thief-taker and receiver Jonathan Wild, which contains the line: ‘The master who teaches them should be a man well versed in the cant language, commonly called the Slang Patter, in which they should by all means excel.’ Wild was hanged in 1725; the pamphlet is dated 1758. And while it was allegedly ‘printed from a manuscript, said to be written by Jonathan Wild while under condemnation in Newgate’, its signature ‘Henry Humbug’ almost certainly suggests a later, satirical author. (Though to what extent, given the paucity of citations, cant was ‘commonly called the Slang Patter’ even in 1758 remains debatable. The next such use is not until a ballad of the 1780s.)

The word was yet to reach the dictionary and no useful attempt at an etymology was proposed prior to that of the slang lexicographer John Camden Hotten in 1859. ‘The word Slang is only mentioned by two lexicographers Webster and Ogilvie. Johnson, Walker, and the older compilers of dictionaries give “slang” as the preterite of “sling,” but not a word about Slang in the sense of low, vulgar, or unrecognised language. The origin of the word has often been asked for in literary journals and books, but only one man, until recently, ever hazarded an etymology Jonathan Bee. With a recklessness peculiar to ignorance, Bee stated that Slang was derived from “the slangs or fetters worn by prisoners, having acquired that name from the manner in which they were worn, as they required a sling of string to keep them off the ground”.’6 Hotten’s own belief was that ‘Slang is not an English word; it is the Gipsy term for their secret language, and its synonym is Gibberish another word which was believed to have had no distinct origin.’7

Neither Barrère and Leland (1889–90) nor Farmer and Henley (1890–1904) took things any further in their slang dictionaries. It was left to the professionals at the on-going OED. Sir William Craigie, dealing with slang in its first edition, took that Dictionary’s usual cautious view on such matters: it was ‘a word of cant origin, the ultimate source of which is not apparent’; this refusal to hazard any further guess has not been modified since. Craigie compounded his rejection of possible origins with a further note: ‘the date and early associations of the word make it unlikely that there is any connection with certain Norwegian forms in sleng- which exhibit some approximation in sense’. This flat declaration ran quite contrary to the views of another Oxford philologist, Walter Skeat, whose Etymological Dictionary of the English Language had appeared between 1879 and 1882. Skeat attributed slang unequivocally to the Scandinavian languages. Listing such terms as the Norwegian sleng (‘a slinging, an invention, device, stratagem … a little addition or burthen of a song, in verse and melody’), ettersleng (lit. afterslang, ‘a burthen at the end of a verse or ballad’), slengjenamn (a nickname), slengjeord (an insulting word or allusion), the Icelandic slyngr and slunginn (well-versed in, cunning), and the Swedish slanger (to gossip), Skeat showed himself free of all doubt: ‘that all the above Norwegian and Icelandic words are derivatives from “sling” is quite clear … I see no objection to this explanation’. Contemporary etymologists tended to follow Skeat. More recently Eric Partridge, never one to let caution fetter his own deductive skills, modified the Norwegian thesis in his own etymological dictionary. For him slang is a dialect past participle of the verb sling, which has its roots in Old and Middle English and links to Old Norse, thus giving the concept of ‘slung’ or ‘thrown’ language. This conveniently encompasses the abusive side of slang, e.g. ‘sling off at’, and is duly bolstered by the Norwegian slenga keften (also cited by Skeat), lit. to ‘sling the jaw’, and thus, literally, to use slang, as well as Skeat’s slengjeord. The current, on-line OED remains unconvinced.

Definitions

Thus the roots, or lack of them; what of the definition? Set firmly amid respectable language by the OED, slang as a word remains essentially unchanged as to its definitions and in its use, even if it continues to develop as a vocabulary. The philologists and lexicographers remain generally consistent in their opinions. Since the OED laid down lexicographical law they may have replaced simple definition by more complex explanation, but they differ only in the nuances.

‘Slang is a poor man‘s poetry,’8 suggested John Moore in You English Words (1962), a sentiment underpinning the title of the American academic Michael Adams’s study Slang: the People’s Poetry (2009). And like the poor, to whom must be attributed credit for the coinage, or at least the popularization of a major portion of its vocabulary, slang is always with us. Whether, as one observer suggests, it is the working man of language, doing the lexicon’s ‘dirty work’ or, as Moore and Adams imply, it represents the lyrical creativity of the disenfranchised or, as its many critics still proclaim, it has nothing but the most deleterious effects on ‘proper speech’, slang remains a law unto itself.

As a linguistic phenomenon it surely predates the Christian era. The mid-nineteenth-century slang lexicographer John Camden Hotten, as keen as any other Victorian scholar to find antecedents in the classical and pre-classical worlds, offers the readers of his Slang Dictionary (1859) an alluring, if somewhat fantastical picture of this ‘universal and ancient’ species of language. ‘If we are to believe implicitly the saying of the wise man, that “there is nothing new under the sun” the “fast” men of buried Nineveh, with their knotty and door-matty looking beards, may have cracked Slang jokes on the steps of Sennacherib’s palace; and the stones of Ancient Egypt, and the bricks of venerable and used up Babylon, may, for aught we know, be covered with slang hieroglyphics unknown to modern antiquarians …’ As a word in itself, however, it only emerges into the (printed) language in the mid-eighteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary (1933 and unrevised at the time of writing), which included primarily that slang terminology which occurred in literature and in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century glossarists, defined the term as ‘The special vocabulary used by any set of persons of a low or disreputable character; language of a low a vulgar type’, and adds somewhat circuitously, ‘Language of a highly colloquial type, considered as below the level of standard educated speech, and consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense’. (Colloquial being defined as ‘Belonging to common speech; characteristic of or proper to ordinary conversation, as distinguished from formal or elevated language’.) The word is so far first recorded in 1756, when in Act I of William Toldervy’s play The History of the Two Orphans one finds ‘Thomas Throw had been upon the town, knew the slang well; […] and understood every word in the scoundrel’s dictionary.’ And immediately one is faced by a possible question. Was Throw’s ‘slang’ a reference to his speech, or to a duplicitous and probably criminal way of conducting himself? Given the final phrase, one may suppose that the reference is indeed to his vocabulary. In which case the slang in question is no more than a synonym for cant, or criminal jargon, and does not involve the more general sense of today. (Toldervy himself ‘knew the slang’ as well. Among the hundred-plus examples in his play are dewbeaters, shoes, fribble, an impotent male, and corner-cupboard, the vagina.) By the turn of the century the definitions had broadened.

As well as standing synonymous with cant, slang began to be used as an alternative to jargon or ‘professional slang’ by such luminaries as Charles Kingsley (in a letter of 1857). George Eliot (in Middlemarch, 1872) referred not merely to the slang of shopkeepers (decrying ‘superior’ as used of comestibles) but added that ‘all choice of words is a slang […] correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.’9 G. A. Sala, in his 1856 essay for Dickens’s Household Words (see Chapter 7), attacks slang, but seems to be targeting the affectations and idiosyncrasies of various styles of standard speech, rather than the lists of vulgar synonyms (for ‘drunk’, etc.) which he appears despite his protestations to revel in itemizing. More notably the word, if not the vocabulary, had been enlisted in standard English by the mid-century and dignified by John Keble (in 1818), Thackeray (in Vanity Fair, 1848) and many other respectable users. In 1858 Trollope, in Dr Thorne, a story featuring murder, seduction and bastardy, speaks of ‘fast, slang men, who were fast and slang and nothing else’, a citation that points up both their language and their rakehell, buckish style.

Across the Channel, Balzac, writing of argot, the French equivalent to cant, proclaimed that ‘there is no more energetic or colourful language than that of this subterranean world’.10 Victor Hugo was less tolerant. His ‘condemned man’ shrank from it as ‘an odious phraseology grafted on the general language, like a hideous excrescence’.11 And in a whole chapter devoted to argot in Les Misérables, Hugo saw it as ‘a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization’, and termed it ‘a horrid murmur, resembling the human accent but nearer to growls than to words. That is argot. The words are misshapen, distorted by some kind of fantastic bestiality. We might be hearing the speech of hydras. It is the unintelligible immersed in shadow; it grunts and whispers, adding enigma to the encircling gloom. Misfortune is dark and crime is darker still, and it is of these two darknesses put together that argot is composed.’12 Yet it was also Hugo who, in the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, evoked the ‘kingdom of Argot’ and all its supposed citizens, a tour de force of imaginative creation.

Zola, typically in L’Assommoir (1877), made it a cornerstone of literary realism, but Zola’s use of argot and langue populaire elicited widespread criticism and in the UK such language was cited alongside his alleged ‘immorality’ as justification to ban his work and in 1889 to imprison Henry Vizetelly, the publisher who put it out in translation.

Francis Grose in his dictionary of 1785 defines it as ‘cant language’. (Pierce Egan, in his revision of 1823, has dropped the entry.) But Grose does not expand, and the first ‘proper’ dictionary definition is to be found written by Noah Webster in 1828: ‘low, vulgar, unmeaning language’. Webster’s successors offered a variety of takes. Examples include the 1864 Webster-Mahn, which amended its definition to read: ‘low, vulgar, unauthorized language; a colloquial mode of expression, especially such as is in vogue with some class in society’. Discussing ‘The Rationale of Slang’ (1870), the Overland Monthly defined it as the ‘spontaneous outburst of the thought power become vocal’ and noted that the lexis had no purpose ‘other than emphasis or illustration’.13 Webster’s rival, Joseph Worcester (1879), called it ‘vile, low, or vulgar language; the cant of sharpers or of the vulgar; gibberish’. Brander Matthews, writing in Harper’s magazine on ‘The Function of Slang’ (1893),14 defined it as ‘A word or phrase used with a meaning not recognized in polite letters, either because it had just been invented, or because it had passed out of memory … A collection of colloquialisms gathered from all sources, and all bearing alike the bend sinister of illegitimacy.’

In 1913, the New Standard Dictionary explained slang as ‘the speech or dialect of a special sect, profession, or class of persons’ and added that slang is used for ‘expressions that are either coarse and rude in themselves or chiefly current among the coarser and ruder parts of the community’. The OED’s somewhat circuitous definition has been noted above. The New Encyclopedia Britannica (1982), in a discursive entry written by the cant collector David Maurer, calls it ‘unconventional words or phrases that express either something new or something old in a new way. It is flippant, irreverent, indecorous; it may be indecent or obscene. Its colourful metaphors are generally directed at respectability, and it is this succinct, sometimes witty, frequently impertinent social criticism that gives slang its characteristic flavour. Slang, then, includes not just words but words used in a special way in a certain social context.’

To turn to more recent definitions, John Simpson of the OED has explained that ‘As a rule of thumb we classify a slang word as an alternative to a more formal word, typically used by a subset of the speech population, and a colloquial term as an informal term used widely in the speech community.’15 The current on-line Merriam-Webster has ‘an informal nonstandard vocabulary composed typically of coinages, arbitrarily changed words, and extravagant, forced, or facetious figures of speech’ (http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/slang). Gale Cengage Learning has ‘A type of informal verbal communication that is generally unacceptable for formal writing. Slang words and phrases are often colorful exaggerations used to emphasize the speaker’s point; they may also be shortened versions of an often-used word or phrase.’16 Wikipedia’s entry is cited above. The Urban Dictionary, in sway to lexicographic relativism, offers a choice of thirty-three variant definitions, of which the most popular is the self-congratulatory ‘the only reason Urbandictionary.com exists’. The few more reasoned alternatives seem to be far less favoured by the users.

As Hugo’s lines suggest, slang has also elicited a good many condemnations, rendering what should be scholarly assessment into mere value judgements. Even moral ones and certainly social assumptions. An unaccountable fear that the streets, even if suppressed economically, are somehow going to rise up linguistically.

Johnson was of course at pains to rid his dictionary of vulgarity, and his initial commission had been to prepare a lexicon of purified English. Slang rarely entered the standard dictionaries, although Elisha Coles allowed some cant in 1676 and Nathan Bailey offered an entire cant appendix in 1730. Critics pontificated de haut en bas on both sides of the Atlantic. Typically John F. Genung, who in 1893 announced that ‘slang is to a people’s language what an epidemic disease is to their bodily constitution; just as catching and just as inevitable in its turn […] Like a disease, too, it is severest where the sanitary conditions are most neglected.’17 The idea of slang as a ‘disease’; or a ‘perversion’, not simply of language but of society at large, permeates such remarks. Few, however, could equal the editor James C. Fernald, who commenced his essay ‘The Impoverishment of the Language: Cant, Slang, Etc.’ in Progressive English (1918) thus: ‘The touch of decay is upon all things earthly. Frost, rain, and wind are casting down the mountains, and the rivers are washing the rock-dust far out into the sea … The Pyramids, stripped of the casing of hewn stone that once covered them are now but rude, though mighty towers in the lonely desert. The Parthenon […] was desolated long ago … The stately monuments of imperial Rome are dismantled from the top and dust-embedded from the base. Language shares the same tendency to decay.’18 We may laugh: it would seem that Mr Fernald cried.

And continued: ‘Slang, for the most part, comes up from the coarse and more ignorant portion of the community. […] ‘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 of mental poverty … It so largely comes from the coarse and rude elements of our population, or even from the baser associations and pursuits.’19

Yay or nay, the reality remains that posited by Jonathan Lighter and Bethany K. Dumas in their 1978 essay ‘Is Slang a Word for Linguists?’:20 ‘Annoyance and frustration await anyone who searches the professional literature for a definition or even a conception of SLANG that can stand up to scrutiny. Instead one finds impressionism, much of it of a dismaying kind.’21 And of all the definitions on offer there is much to be said for Lighter’s own synthesis, in the Cambridge History of the English Language: ‘So taking into account the various definitions in dictionaries as well as the more detailed treatments of such authors as Henry Bradley, Stuart Flexner […] H. L. Mencken, and Eric Partridge, the following definition will be stipulated […]: Slang denotes an informal, nonstandard, nontechnical vocabulary composed chiefly of novel-sounding synonyms (and near synonyms) for standard words and phrases; it is often associated with youthful, raffish, or undignified persons and groups; and it conveys often striking connotations of impertinence or irreverence, especially for established attitudes and values within the prevailing culture.’22

Etymology and definition aside, there is also the question of what is slang. And what is not. The dictionary and other definitions did not attempt this, until in 1933 Eric Partridge, writing his pioneering overview Slang To-day and Yesterday, offered some seventeen criteria which might make a word slang. Julie Coleman, in her history The Story of Slang (2012), has reduced the qualifications to eleven. Lighter and Dumas cut them down to four. In all cases these calculations would appear to be the product of reverse-engineering the vocabulary. Yet in answering their own question, Lighter and Dumas have made it clear that slang is not, ultimately, a word for linguists, that it cannot be shoehorned into twenty-one, let alone four sizes fit all.

The problem with the various sets of categories is that all assume a conscious will on behalf of the speaker. Mads Holmsgaard Eriksen, in a study on ‘Translating the use of slang’ prepared as a thesis for Aarhus University in 2010, offers a synthesis of what has come before and states that ‘these elements shows us what the function of slang is: a social instrument of words and expressions employed in speech and informal settings in order to create group relations with people you identity with and to rebel against standard language, and to signal the speaker’s attitude and the speaker’s belief in the listener’s ability to relate to and understand what is being said’.23

All of which may indeed be the case with slang as found in fiction: take for example the work of a superlative exponent of the style, P. G. Wodehouse, whose 100-plus novels are all saturated with slang, and who used the lexis for a reason. (Its humorous potential being, as story succeeds story, further intensified by the author’s disregard for chronological accuracy: late-nineteenth-century terms cheerfully rubbing shoulders with those decades younger.) So too did the Restoration playwrights, the nineteenth-century Newgate novelists and the purveyors of modern romans noirs, movie scripts and graphic novels. Slang adds authenticity and atmosphere. Some users, those for whom slang is simply one more fashionable accessory, may use it consciously, but most do not. Their slang use is transparent. It is there, it is the way they talk. One may interrogate, say, an engineer and uncover the language that he uses for professional communications; fieldwork on the street is more difficult. ‘What slang?’ say the users. They may never use a standard word or phrase, but for them slang is the standard. This is not to deny a learning curve, as in any form of communication, and that may be dictated by the norms of the group with whom one wishes to be associated, but no one is thinking ‘slang’, simply ‘that is what I/we call …’ It is, as Eriksen, paraphrasing Michael Adams, puts it, ‘a set of words and expressions in a given language used to create group dynamics’.24 The problem for members of such groups begins when they move beyond their ‘normal’ environment and into the wider world. Slang fluency becomes standard inarticulacy and it is that perception that stands behind regular criticisms of the lexis, especially as tied into the currently dominant form of slang – that found in rap music – as underpinning illiteracy, joblessness, street crime and even riots.

This is a lexicographer’s history and not a linguist’s. Its subject is the words, not pictures of words. Its aim is therefore the accretion of the lexis and the background to that accretion rather than the linguistic status of the register. For all the criteria, for all the inconsistent yet ultimately similar definitions, one is left, like the judge who knows pornography but still cannot say exactly what it is, as knowing it when one meets it. Michael Adams, whose own interest in slang includes his study of the language used in the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Slayer Slang, 2003), agrees: ‘Slang is what it is. You’ll know it when you hear it.’25 For him much is down to context and the need to create a social link to those with whom one is speaking. Simply checking a dictionary definition, let alone multiple definitions, offers no help. As fellow slang expert Connie Eble puts it: ‘Slang cannot be defined independent of its functions and use.’26 And both cite James B. McMillan from 1978: ‘the basic problem of slang lexicology – definition of the class – has not been solved […] Until slang can be objectively identified and segregated (so that dictionaries will not vary in labeling particular lexemes and idioms) or until more precise subcategories replace the catchall label SLANG, little can be done to analyze linguistically this kind of lexis.’27

Etymological Roots

Slang, and cant before it, has always been promiscuous in its accretion of sources. At the time of writing my current database runs to approximately 54,000 headword entries (derivations, compounds and phrasal uses bringing the total slang lexis to approximately 125,000 terms). Setting aside some 33% of the etymologies which cross-refer to another slang headword, the first and foremost of these sources is standard English, the twisting, tweaking and otherwise ludic exploitation of which accounts for at least 15% of the vocabulary. In terms of register, rhyming slang and abbreviations offer around 5% each, and lesser roles are played by puns and plays on words (c. 1,400 entries), dialect (870 entries), proper names (375 entries), echoic uses (257 entries) and brand names (90 entries). In terms of languages, the most influential has been French with 400 etymologies, followed by Scottish (305), Latin (241), Irish (220), Afrikaans (212), Yiddish (199), German (195), Italian (162), Dutch (152), Romani (117), Hindi (79), Hebrew (44), Greek (40), Welsh (31), Twi (25), Spanish (21), Zulu (20), Yoruba (14) and Arabic (7).

2

In the Beginning:The Pre-History

As we have seen, John Camden Hotten, writing in 1859, believed that slang was not simply old, but almost pre-historical. ‘For aught we know,’ he suggested, it was used in Nineveh, Babylon and ancient Egypt.

For aught we know, indeed, but the problem is that we do not know, and while one wishes to state unequivocally ‘In the beginning’, the story of the earliest slangs might just as well be prefaced ‘Once upon a time’. The problem for the lexicographer is that even had such lexes been used, no one seems to have bothered to have acknowledged them, at least for the record, and slang’s invariable identification with and use by the less privileged classes of society meant that such texts – one could hardly at this early stage talk of books, nor indeed of publishing – that were set down, eschewed it. It is frustrating, but it would seem that whether or not such ur-slangs existed, their vocabulary will remain a secret.

Where, then, can we start? Since one requires evidence, then the best place would seem to be Classical Rome. Yet even here what we are observing is still not the spoken language of the streets, but primarily the image-filled language of literature, delivered in a consciously lower register than the standard and used, as often as not, for conscious effect. But as for spoken Latin, which might provide examples of non-standard usage, the true ‘vulgar Latin’, as L. R. Palmer has made clear, ‘we have no text which is a faithful record of even one mode of contemporary speech […] It is only through their inadvertences, almost willy-nilly, that the writers give us hints that their natural speech deviates from the language of the schoolroom which they are at pains to use.’1 Certain authors are more useful than others. The comedies of Plautus, the erotic verses of Catullus, the epigrams, often obscene, of Martial, even certain comments by Cicero. Equally productive is The Priapeia, a collection of short Latin poems in the shape of usually coarse epigrams affixed to the statues of the god Priapus, itself invariably adorned with an outsize phallus; translated by the orientalist Sir Richard Burton (of Kama Sutra fame), it was issued in 1890 by Leonard Smithers, the period’s best-known publisher of pornography (as well as of the works of Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Aleister Crowley and Oscar Wilde). Editions had been available, in part or whole, since the mid-fifteenth century. We may also look profitably at some of the insults used in the classical period.

At first glance the Latin vocabulary provides us with the desired evidence. If sufficient proof of slang’s origins was to be found in the display of its under-pinning themes, then Latin is undoubtedly a precursor of modernity. As James Allen has laid out in The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (1982), terms for the penis, aside from its primary names of mentula and verpa (an erect or circumcised penis), can be categorized variously as sharp or pointed instruments (colcata cuspis, a pointed stem), weapons (arcum, a bow, ensis and machaera, a sword, sicula, a dagger), household objects (pilum, a pestle, pondus, a weight, rutabulum, an oven rake or poker), poles and stakes (caduceus, a wand, radius, a rod, virgo, a rod, virgula, a wand), agricultural implements (ligo, a mattock, raster, a hoe, subucula, an awl), personifications and animal metaphors (anguis, a snake, passer, a sparrow, titus, a dove, natrix, a water-snake or whip; the snake imagery can be found in similar uses in classical Greek), anatomical metaphors (venus, literally a vein, cauda, a tail, neruus, a sinew), tools, implements and vessels (capula, a handle, falx, a sickle, vas, a vessel, vomer, a ploughshare), private property (peculum, ‘the private thing’), as well as metaphors drawn from food (cuculis, a cucumber, olera, herbs), nature (curculio, a corn-worm, a weevil, caulis, a cabbage stalk, thyrsus, a plant stem), the sea and from music (pecten, a plectrum used in playing the lyre). The euphemism pudenda, the parts of shame, was still used in slang dictionaries well into the twentieth century. Even the one-eyed trouser snake may have a Latin ‘ancestor’ in the one-off use of monstrum by Ausonius:2 the ‘monster’ in question, referring in context to the penis, was stolen from Virgil, who was referring to Polyphemus, who of course had but a single eye. It has been argued that futuo, used specifically of a male client copulating with a whore, is one of the etymologies of the modern fuck. It is unlikely, even if the word was undoubtedly obscene, and lies behind sixteenth-century Italian’s fottuere, which the Anglo-Italian lexicographer John Florio gave in 1598 as one of his synonyms for fuck, and thence French foutre.

Looking at my own Slang Down the Ages (1986), which deals with the modern lexis, one can find a similar list of penis-metaphors, typically: weapons, knives and daggers, guns, sticks, the hunter, food, proper names, nursery terms, anatomy and euphemism. As in Latin, large, small, erect and flaccid members are also dealt with. If one moves from the penis to the remainder of the sexual world, the situation is the same: the images found in Latin that stand in for the vagina (animals, fields and similar spaces, ditches and pits, caves, containers, doors and pathways) and for sexual intercourse (among them eating, striking, cutting and splitting, digging, wounding, grinding, kneading, ploughing, fighting, working, killing, riding and playing) are similarly echoic across the centuries.

Trium litterarum homo is how Plautus, in Aulularia (The Pot of Gold), describes one character. The term is literally a ‘man of three letters’, and the phrase reappeared in the mid-twentieth century, even if Plautus’ acronym spelt F-V-R, a thief, and the modern three-letter man has meant F-A-G or G-A-Y, a homosexual. Insults, while sometimes quite formal, can also foreshadow slang’s future. And as in modern slang, they use terms of sexuality, criminality and stupidity. Among those listed by Eleanor Dickey3 are asine (ass), canis (dog), cucule (cuckoo), excetra (water-snake) and vipera (viper); furcifer (one punished with the furca), and its superlative trifurcifer; levis (‘light’, fickle), moriture and periture (about to die), pestis (plague), putide (rotten), scelerum caput (‘head of crimes’), mastigia and verbero (one who merits a whipping), and verpe (the erect/circumcised penis). The epitome, but far from as common as its successor uses, is cunne, literally a cunt. Such are among the standard terms of abuse, but the imagery, again, has continued into modernity. The negative personification of penis has given prick, cock, knob, dork and many more. Those who are deemed worthy of death or punishment include the canary (as in prisoner) -bird and the gallows-bird; the use of ‘bad’ animals, e. g. a snake, remains a way of identifying ‘bad’; humans, and senses similar to the ‘head of crimes’ can be found in a range of negative terms using -head or -face for a suffix.

Yet we must not be seduced too easily. Latin vulgarisms and insults, however much they can be seen as presaging terms that emerge in modern slang, are just that: vulgarisms and insults used in Latin. It is possible that on occasion they were those of the street, and some are borne out in collected graffiti, but compared to the steady drumbeat of modern slang usage they are few and they are far between. That their imagery is familiar is hardly surprising; humanity has not changed that much and the goods and bads of language, any language, tend to reflect similar moral and emotional positions. Not only that, but these early instances of such terms are far from widespread. To return to Professor Palmer, what one is seeing is not consistent use, nor, of course, can one prove that this is language as spoken. As Palmer puts it, within ‘the dead landscape of literary Latin’ there are ‘seismic areas where occasional eruptions reveal the intense subterranean activity’.4

These seismic areas, these occasional eruptions, do not increase in volume for virtually 1,400 years after Christ. They remain elusive, even if they may well be active beneath the ‘seen’ language. And when they do make the surface they generally do so, it should not come as any surprise, as representative of the real underworld, that of crime. Given that as regards the West the Middle Ages were for the slang researcher, as Eric Partridge has said, ‘the dark ages’,5 if one seeks slang at that time then one must look East and to the Arabic world, which as in medicine and mathematics was not subjected to the limiting obscurities of omnipresent Christianity. Here the world of the beggars, rogues, criminals and confidence tricksters, known as the Banu Sāsān6 (the Sons of Sāsān), evolved their own slang, or more properly, since it was restricted to that world, criminal jargon or argot. And more vitally, such jargon was recorded in a number of Quas¸īda Sāsāniyya, (‘Poems about the Banu people’), lengthy poems recounting the underworld life, and larded, naturally, with its terminology. The first of these, by the traveller and physician Abu Dulaf, appeared in the second half of the tenth century, probably in western Iran. A second was written in Iraq four centuries later by the poet Safi d-Din al Hilli. Between them they offer some 540 specific terms. And as such they can be seen as the direct precursors of the European ‘beggar books’ (see Chapter 3) that are in turn the first emanations of ‘slang lexicography’. As well as listing a variety of occupations – snake-charmers, the exhibitors of bears or monkeys, doctors both qualified and quack, a variety of those extolling and exploiting religion, even those who perform ‘moonlight flits’ to avoid their bills or rent – Abu Dulaf offers beggarly tricks that seem quite timeless.

35. And the one who simulates a festering internal wound, and the people with false bandages round their heads and sickly, jaundiced faces. Al-hājāūr is the person who pierces a hole in an egg, which he secretes in his bosom, so that it oozes out as a yellow liquid. Al-kadhdhābāt are bandages which the beggars tie round their foreheads, and in this way make people think that they are ill. […]

37. Maisara is when a person begs, alleging that he has come from the frontier region […] Makht¸ara is when a person swallows his tongue, and gives people the impression that the Greeks have cut it out. […]

66. Wa minnā kullu mamrūr. These are a group of people who wear ragged clothes and shave off their beards, thereby creating the impression that their minds are deranged through melancholia and have an excess of bile. […] The generality of people account them mad, and no one punishes them for what they say.

67. Wa-man yakalu. This is the person who has with him a piece of cotton dipped in olive oil, which he rubs over his eyes to induce a flow of tears. He sets about lamenting his wretched state and accosting people for money, relating the story of how he has been set upon by brigands or how his property has been unjustly confiscated. These musta’ridūn are the real aristocracy of the beggars.

All remains, nonetheless, quite fragmentary. In 1200 the West makes its first scratch on the record, and that is only debatable. Around that year one Jehan Bodel (1165–1210), a poet from Arras in north-eastern France and best known for his chansons de geste memorializing in verse the derring-do of various kings and knightly nobles, wrote Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas. The poem, considered as the first French miracle play, recounts the saint’s successful campaign to persuade four thieves to restore a stolen treasure. Within the play, alongside the saint’s activities, are those of three villains, found predictably in a tavern, who perform the robbery. Scholars have long since argued as to whether certain of their lines included terms that could be categorized as argot, i.e. criminal language. The glossary to Albert Henry’s 1981 edition marks such terms as geugon (a potboy), teme (to open, lit. to broach), santissiés (be quiet, shut up), asemer (to render thin), and dap/paier un dap (a blow/to cut), as unequivocal ‘argot’. However, the argot specialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably Francisque Michel, Marcel Schwob and Lazare Sainéan, were less impressed. For them argot begins in 1455 with the trial of the Coquillards, posing as legitimate merchants but preying on unfortunate travellers.

Before looking at that, perhaps the first major way station in the collection and assessment of any criminal language, one should re-cross the Channel. The twenty-four stories that make up The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), began appearing in manuscript around 1387. And among them there are undoubtedly what appear to be slang usages, notably in the Reeve’s and Miller’s Tales, predictably the most bawdy of the collection.

Given that bawdiness it is unsurprising that the terminology of sex plays a major role: swive (to have sexual intercourse), prick (to enter a woman), belle-chose, quaint and quoniam (the vagina; all euphemisms, the latter pair playing on cunt), fire (‘of Saint Anthony’, i.e. a venereal disease), gay (of a woman, leading an immoral life or working as a prostitute), hot (sexually aroused and/or available), honey and pigsnyes (terms of endearment), loteby (a mistress), malkin (a female) and wench (a woman). Defecation was the source of various jokes, and Chaucer uses arse and tail (the anus or buttocks), hole (the anus), gong (a privy), jordan (a chamberpot), fart and piss (both found as nouns and verbs), and shitten (covered in excrement, filthy). And there were oaths: Christ! cock (euphemizing God), for Christ’s sake! Gad, as in Gad’s precious and Gad’s bones, and nails! which referred to ‘god’s nails’, i.e. those of the crucifixion.

But if Chaucer, as defined by the nineteenth-century literary historian Frank Chandler,7 ‘depicts vice humorously with all the tolerance of a great artist’, then one who might be seen as his opposite number, another fourteenth-century author, William Langland (c. 1330–c. 1386), also offers a small ‘slang’ lexis. In his great religious allegory of Piers Plowman, which appeared in various revisions between 1367 and 1386, he is ‘intent upon preaching penitence’,8 but before penitence must come sin, and Langland shows readers ‘the arts, lies, hypocrisy, wealth and pride of […] archdeacons, summoners, pardoners, monks’ and the rest of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In so doing his terminology at times overlaps with that of Chaucer: among the shared terms are arse, malkin, placebo and wench, the oaths Jesus! and by Christ! Langland also offers bacon (human flesh, and thus a human being), bitch (used derogatorily of a woman), buzzard (a weak foolish person, a gullible dupe), catchpole (a sergeant or bailiff, especially one who arrests for debt), bad penny (an unpleasant, untrustworthy person), daffy (an eccentric, a mad person and as such used some 520 years before it was next recorded), dead as a door-nail, grope (to fondle sexually), guts (the stomach), land-loper (a vagabond), lubber (a fool), tail (in his use the vagina), troll (to wander around) and weeds (clothes).

Nor was the use of such terms restricted to purely canonical writers, although the nature of ‘publishing’ meant that what has lasted from the period must imply a certain literary longevity. It was certainly far from the streets. The thematic groups that would underpin slang gradually fill out as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries pass. There is the penis: bow, cock, lance, pin and sword; the testicles: ballocks and eggs; the genitals: privates and jewels, albeit not yet ‘family’ ones. Gear, lap, socket, and trench meant the vagina; a game was an act of sexual intercourse, as was a ride, also found as a verb, clicket (usually used of animals), and jape (lit. ‘to play’). The horn stood for cuckoldry, while to burn was to be infected with VD.

The prostitute has her role: a cat, a hackney, a kate, a ramp and a tickle-tail. A mare was a mistress while a female mackerel ran a brothel; to be light, of a woman, was to be seen as promiscuous and referred to the ‘lightness’ of her heels, so easily raised towards the ceiling. There were terms of communication: blow (to discredit, to defame), cackler (a tale-teller, one who talks ‘out of turn’), capron hardy (an impudent fellow; calqued from the synonymous French capron hardi, lit. ‘a bold hood’, the garment metonymizing the man), choking oyster (a reply that silences one’s opponent), sneck drawer (a flatterer), tilly-vally (nonsense). Mompyns were teeth, muzzle the face. And there was naturally crime: barker (a thug), bell-wether (the leader of a mob), lime-twig (a thief; their ‘sticky fingers’), moocher (a petty thief), pilgarlic (an outcast), scour (to wear fetters).

That these terms would in time enter the slang dictionaries is unarguable. But we must still ask: at the time that they were used, the mid to late fourteenth century, can they be classified as ‘slang’. Unlike the beggar books of the sixteenth century, they are undoubtedly nearer to what would become ‘civilian’ slang, France’s langue populaire or argot commun – there is no criminal jargon in either list – and their preoccupations are very much those that continue to underpin the slang lexis seven centuries later: the parts of the body, sexuality, defecation, misogyny, insults. They are also voiced by the lower classes of society. Again, a near prerequisite of slang. And it is true that for research purposes they offer the lexicographer some very early uses of the terms in question. Nor, in certain cases, are they even the oldest uses. Abbot Aelfric’s Latin to Anglo-Saxon Glossary (c. 1000) translates podex as ars and testiculi as beallucas, the ‘ancestor’ of the modern bollocks. No one would pretend that the writer-theologian was an adept of the counter-language.

One might argue that because there yet exists no definition for a phenomenon, in this case slang, that is not to say that it does not exist in itself. And again, one can say that because of the topics and themes with which they were concerned, when slang was defined and corralled off from standard English these words would qualify for that lexis. But at a time when there was no such concept as slang, they were not slang. What they were, at a time when the elites still spoke Norman French, or even Latin, was English, in linguistic terms Middle English, and still something of an upstart. This was not the vocabulary of elite speakers, but of the wider population, who had not fallen prey to the French cultural ascendancy that had followed on the Norman Conquest. Like slang, English, it might be suggested, started in the street. What they spoke was the vulgar tongue, the idea of which in 1785 provided Francis Grose with a title for his influential slang dictionary. Vulgar as in Latin’s vulgus, the crowd.

Seventy years after Chaucer, and back again across La Manche, we finally reach the first concrete examples of what, if not slang, would in lexicographical terms be its immediate precursor: criminal jargon, known, since the backdrop is France, as argot