JONATHON GREEN ON SLANG.

November 6, 2011 by 4 Comments

The Browser has one of its FiveBooks interviews with Jonathon Green, whose admirable Green’s Dictionary of Slang I wrote about in this post; I especially liked his discussion of the five books he recommends, ending with Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word (which I reviewed here): “Everybody should look at this and see how lexicography should be done, because it is a superb piece of work. It’s not a grubby book, or a meretricious book, it’s an amazing piece of scholarship.” Quite so, and the same is true of Green’s own magnum opus.

Comments

  1. AJP Crown says
    November 7, 2011 at 3:11 am

    It’s not a grubby book
    is how a schoolmaster, and an old one at that, would have described it forty years ago. Jonathon Green is morphing into his own research.

  2. Treesong says
    November 7, 2011 at 4:44 pm

    So, old donnish slang, or what? To my Transatlantic ear it’s a perfectly standard word, and quite evocative of crude meretriciousness. Merriam-Webster 9th Collegiate gives as the (historically) last definition ‘worthy of contempt : BASE’ without any usage label.

  3. dearieme says
    November 7, 2011 at 7:18 pm

    Is there a slang word for “slang”?

  4. AJP Crown, OED. says
    November 8, 2011 at 5:01 am

    For grubby, the OED has 3. Dirty, grimy; also slovenly and underbred [underbred, not ill-bred?]. And its first citation is 1845 HOOD Black Job vi, They look’d so ugly in their sable hides: So dark, so dingy, like a grubby lot Of sooty sweeps.
    But there’s also Grub-street, which it can cite from 1630, nowadays (ironically) Milton Street, “the name of a street near Moorfields in London ‘much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems’ (J.); hence used allusively for the tribe of mean and needy authors, of literary hacks.” – So The F-Word is a grubby book, actually.
    No, it’s not donnish. When I wrote the first comment, I was thinking of grubby meaning “filthy” in the sense of having to do with sex. I’m guessing that’s just a usage from the late-19C.

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