New Timelines for Sexual Intercourse added:

Intercourse pt 1: The Basics: http://bit.ly/18Htiop
Intercourse pt 2: Oral etc: http://bit.ly/13nceoQ
Intercourse pt 3: Orgasm, Fluids, etc: http://bit.ly/19ow4kt

I am building a series of Timelines based on the database that underlies Green’s Dictionary of Slang.

These are the links to those currently available:

Penis: http://bit.ly/14hM1V4
Vagina: http://bit.ly/1257HXD

Drunk: http://bit.ly/1dfdrjm
Alcohol: http://bit.ly/1b4ANMW
Pubs and Bars: http://bit.ly/17C9Vwo

A talk given to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester as part of a Conference to celbrate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the publication of A Clockwork Orange

The phrase queer as a clockwork orange, which means eccentric or bizarre, and can be applied sexually or otherwise, was sourced by Anthony Burgess to late World War II when, as a serving soldier, he heard it in the mess. I am quite willing to believe him: the phrase is cognate with similar slang similes such as queer as a coot, first ascribed to his acquaintance Julian McLaren Ross, queer as a three dollar bill, queer as duck soup, a coinage of the 1930s and oldest of all queer as Dick’s hatband, which seems as impenetrable a construct as Burgess’s borrowing and has been recorded in this sense since at least 1835 (meaning ‘below par, or ‘out of sorts’ it goes back a further half-century). As I say, I wish to believe, but…the problem is that we have no proof. Despite the resources of the Internet, and other than in scholarly articles that quote Burgess himself, the first recorded citation comes as late as 1977, in a glossary appended to a book designed to help policemen battle with the contemporary world.

A paper on ‘Rudyard Kipling and Slang’ delivered to the Rudyard Kipling Society in London on June 29 2012

Rudyard Kipling is not at first sight a particularly ‘slangy’ author. If, as many of us do, we come to him as children he seems positively disapproving. In the Just so Story ‘How the First Letter Was Written he (as Tegumai) admonishes Taffy (his daughter Josephine) for using ‘awful’ to mean ‘great’. ‘Taffy,’ said Tegumai, ‘how often have I told you not to use slang? “Awful” isn’t a pretty word.”.’ Whether or not an adjectival use of ‘awful’ still qualified as slang in 1902 is arguable, and whether Kipling was appeasing those who termed his work vulgar, no matter. The reality is that when one starts dissecting Kipling’s fiction one finds that slang plays a regular, important role. There are hundreds of slang words and phrases in the works, as well as a wide range of job-specific jargon, typically in his sea stories. He uses it for the most basic of reasons: to confer authenticity. He is not a coiner, but a recorder, and his slang lexis is that of the contemporary world, leavened, as in the conversations of the Soldiers Three, by the specifics of a given background.

This is a lecture I gave recently as part of the British Library’s Evolving English program. To accommodate its length I have broken it down into this introduction, and three further parts.

Slang. In the words of the late, and indubitably great Ian Dury: ‘Arseholes, bastards, fucking, cunts and pricks’.  That’s right: ‘Dirty words’. ‘Bad language’. That is, is it not, the popular view. And the popular view is half right. Slang is not ‘bad’ but it is language. It is language as much as is standard English, as much as is jargon, as much as is technicality.  As much as is any of the variant registers that make up English. Or for that matter, and in local context, that make up French, Spanish, Italian, German and so many more.

The book I have just seen published, the three-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang, was seventeen years in the making. The entirety of my work on slang goes back another ten, to the researches for a far slimmer lexicon, the Dictionary of Contemporary Slang. The entirety of the headwords in that book, some 11,500, would fit easily into those now on offer in just the letter S. The big book was born in 1993 when I started putting together the single-volume Cassell Dictionary of Slang. No citations allowed, but once it appeared, in 1998, I was commissioned to create the larger work , to be compiled ‘on historical principles’ which means including usage examples. We had the Cassell material as a core. All we had to do, thereafter, was pick up some citations. We picked up around 575,000, of which 415,000 have been used in the book. But if the Cassell material remains the core, it is a very different work. There was a good deal more work to do.