The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘White-liver’d son of a Fleet-street Bumsitter!’
This erudite study of slang coined by women ends up being a wild goose chase, discovers Lewis Jones
JSOUNDS AND FURIES by Jonathon Green 576pp, Robinson, £16.99, ebook £8.99
onathon Green is justly hailed as the King of Slang. His magnum opus, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, includes some 110,000 words and phrases, treated according to the OED’s “historical principles”, with each definition illustrated by quotation. An ardent and indefatigable philologist, he has produced many other books, among them The Stories of Slang, Slang Down the Ages and the uncompromisingly titled The Big Book of Filth.
“Slang for me,” he writes in his latest, “is first and foremost a counter-language, a term that deliberately mimics the ‘counterculture’ of the 1960s.” This is unsurprising, since Green started out in the “underground” press of Sixties London, and has published three oral histories of that decade.
Equally unsurprising is his baby-boomerish disdain for the “sanctimonious nagging and gloating triumphalism” of political correctness, so inimical to the spirit of slang. Identity politics, he thinks, combines “a self-righteous refusal to learn history with a desperate desire to rewrite it”. Slang is “aggressive, negative, cruel and when approaching those topics that give it the opportunity, sexist”. That is one of the many challenges Green faces in his quest to find “what if any links there are or have been between women and slang”. Another is that most slang is unisex: “If you moved in a given world,” he remarks, “you used the pertinent language. Gender simply didn’t come into it.”
Yet another challenge is that there is scant evidence of women’s use of slang. “How I would wish,” he laments, “that I could plunge my hand into some form of lexical lucky dip and pull out a whole confection of women-created material that has hitherto escaped discovery.” But he cannot. And his quest grows still more arduous, ideologically speaking, since most of the extant evidence, written as it is by men, is open to the “woke” charge of ventriloquism.
His aim, he emphasises, is “to study women and slang, and not women as portrayed within it”. But most of Green’s material obliges him to take the latter course, and his citations are overwhelmingly male. As a result, Sounds & Furies: The Love-Hate Relationship between Women and Slang is a scholarly wild goose chase, incidentally informative and sometimes exhilarating, leading us through fields of filth to nowhere in particular. Much slang is the product of what Hippolyte Taine called “the fouled hindquarters of English life”, and few were fouler than old Billingsgate market. In London Spy (1703), Ned Ward recorded an encounter with its legendary fishwives.
As they “sat Snarling and Grunting at one another, over their Sprats and Whitings”, one of them addressed him: “You White-liver’d Son of a Fleet-street Bumsitter [prostitute], begot upon a [sedan] Chair at Noonday, between
Ludgate and Temple-Bar. You Puppily off-Spring of a Mangy Nightwalker” etc.
Boswell describes how Dr Johnson, for a bet, sent a fishwife into a rage by using grammatical terms, of which she was ignorant, calling her an “article”, a “noun”, a “pronoun” and so on, until she threw herself speechless into the mud. Sex is obviously a principal source, although most of the sex-slang Green records so extensively, unprintable here and all too familiar, is not of female origin.
There are more than a thousand terms for prostitute, of which tart is among the more anodyne (“pretty all over like the jam tarts in the swell bakers’ shops”); it has long been pejorative except, Green assures us, in Liverpool and Australia, where “it remains neutral”. There are 312 terms for a brothel: an abbey, for example, with the bawd an abbess and the “girls” nuns. And 39 terms for the client or punter, among them John, trick, fare and gonk (after a large squashy toy, and surely authentically female). Green does not neglect French, such as magasin des fesses (buttock-shop), pince-cul (arse-pincher) and the horrific maison d’abattage (slaughterhouse), a punishment brothel with queues. He is similarly internationalist in his lexis of “services”: Roman means orgies, Swedish dressing in rubber.
In Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York the women are more ferocious than the men, inflicting “the most fiendish tortures”. Hell-Cat Maggie of the Dead Rabbits “filed her teeth to points and lengthened her fingers with brass nail extensions”, while Sadie the Goat stole a ship, flew the Jolly Roger, plundered the coast of New York, and made her captives walk
the plank. This is all terrific fun, but those furies seem to have left no slang. Happily, the lady crime reporters of Twenties Chicago, such as Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday make up the lack with slug, leggers (as in boot-) and chic young gun widow (Green’s idea of slang is elastic). He admires that decade’s flapper, “that all-girl phenomenon with her all-girl vocabulary”: lounge lizard, red-hot mama and the cat’s miaow, which begat such superlatives as the bee’s knees, the mosquito’s eyebrows and the caterpillar’s kimono.
Passing on from the vamp, “the flapper’s wicked, sexualised cousin”, who sounds fun but seems to have avoided slang, Green has better luck with the school stories of Angela Brazil: “Miss Jones is a stunt, as jinky as you like.” And he has fun with Valspeak, the slang of the Valley Girls of California’s San Fernando Valley: bitchin’, barf me out, random, as if, whatever.
He had great expectations of lesbians. “It is surely not unreasonable,” he sighs, “to hope, even assume that if there was anywhere that would encourage woman-generated slang it would be the lesbian community.” But it turns out that it doesn’t.
“Lesbians,” he decides, “don’t favour slang because slang doesn’t favour lesbians.”
A book on this subject has never before been attempted. “The reason may be,” he concludes,
“that it was a leap too far, a study in piling up bricks in the absence of a single straw. I would like to believe otherwise.” I hope he finds comfort in that belief, but I cannot share it.
Sounds & Furies is ultimately a non-thesis defeated by its own research, and although intermittently entertaining it is also chaotic and repetitive, badly in need of editing or even proofreading. But its failure is at least justified: “What I cannot do,” Green acknowledges, “is find what does not seem to be there.”
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