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street language, smut, innuendo, vulgarity, bawdy

street language, smut, innuendo, vulgarity, bawdy

Roger’s Profanisaurus: Magna Farta

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

hilarious dictionary of slang, smut, indecency, and filth

Do you know the difference between an air biscuit and a trouser cough, or the relationship between a pearl necklace and mammary dandruff? Do you know what an art pamphlet and a bongo periodical have in common? Welcome to the world of Viz, linguistic invention, and ribald scatology. Roger’s Profanisaurus is what I would call an ‘advanced’ and deliberately rude dictionary of slang.

Roger's Profanisaurus: Magna Farta The entries are compiled from contributions to the monthly comic magazine. It assumes as a starting point the lowest and most wide-ranging street language for sexual matters, body functions, and gender preference. And it is blisteringly funny, mainly because each expression is defined by the use of further slang terms which are provocatively allusive, offered in a cod serious tone, and take every opportunity to introduce further vulgarity.

You have to be deep into the laddish frame of reference to know what’s going on. But if you’re interested in the connections between slang and linguistic imagination the effort is well worth it, believe me.

Stanky n. The glaze that is left on the shaft of the choad after a bout of kipper splitting. May be zuffled on curtains or wiped on a stankey-chief.

Even the spoof cross-referencing is funny, because one obscure term is often defined by others which themselves need explanation, or are cloaked in comic metaphor – as in

rear gunner n. In aviation terms, a gunner who shoots one of his own side by firing his lamb cannon (qv) into their bomb bay (qv).

snookered behind the red Unable to sink the pink due to the time of month. The only pot on is a difficult brown.

Some of them are clearly comic inventions, such as

Snogging water;   a male grooming lotion that smells like Joan Collins’ knickers. After shave.

but the majority are explanations of common terms, such as horizontal jogging, rear admiral, and tradesman’s entrance, and there’s also lots of rhyming slang and examples of street language ‘shown’ in the work of famous writers.

You’ll need a strong stomach to take in all the lavatory terms, but essentially it’s kind-hearted smut and self-consciously outrageous sexism – not at all vicious. And there are also, en passant, some interesting sociological details:

Sports bag n. A handy cottaging accessory in which one partner stands to conceal his feet and avoid detection by lavatory attendants looking under the door.

The latest and hugely enlarged edition has just appeared which the publisher describes as “an exhaustive lexicon of four letter filth which contains over 10,000 useful words and phrases to turn the air bluer than a baboon’s arse.”

For those who may not know, the Roger in the title is ‘Roger Mellie, the Man on the Telly’ – one of the regular characters in Viz who specialises in vulgarity. This book is filthy, extremely funny, and very well informed. Since its first appearance it has gone through many new editions. Make sure you get the latest and biggest.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Roger's Profanisaurus: Magna Farta   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Roger's Profanisaurus: Magna Farta   Buy the book at Amazon US


Roger’s Profanisaurus Rex IV: The Magna Farta, London: Dennis Publishing, 2007, pp.480, ISBN: 095485778X


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Filed Under: Dictionaries, Slang Tagged With: Dictionaries, Language, Magna Farta, Roger's Profanisaurus, Slang

Shakespeare’s Bawdy

July 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

all the Bard’s smut, indecency, and suggestiveness

Eric Partridge was a maverick, self-taught Australian lexicographer. In addition to scholarly work on grammar and linguistics, he specialised in slang, swearing, and the colourful language of everyday life. In this classic work from 1941 he combines a study of ‘rude language’ with a scholarly reading of Shakespeare. The result in Shakespeare’s Bawdy is a marvellous compilation of Shakespeare’s linguistic inventiveness and an in-depth study of imagery, allusion, innuendo, and metaphor. Structurally, the book is composed in its first part of introductory essays on sexual, homosexual, and general bawdy; and then in its second part a major glossary of terms, with quoted examples from the plays and poetry.

Shakespeare's Bawdy Partridge assumes that all the opinion, references, and allusions represent Shakespeare’s own personal opinion, rather than that of the characters who express them. This is an approach which many today would take to be critically naive. But I don’t think this matters too much. Most people reading the book will be delighted with Partridge’s learned swashbuckling style, grateful for his scholarship, and amused by the plethora of examples he explores. Here’s a typical example which illustrates both the scholarly detail and the amazing density of the sexual reference he uncovers:

boat hath a leak, her. To Edgar’s Come o’er the bourne, Bessy, to me’, the Fool adds, ‘Her boat hath a leak And she must not speak Why she doth not come over to thee’ (Lear, III vi 25-28). Perhaps, ‘she is having her period’, but probably ‘she is suffering from gonorrhoea’. (Cf. leaky.)
The boat may be the female body (cf. carrack), a rich prize that a man is ready to board; or it may, by a shape-allusion, be the female pudend.

This is a linguistic register in which innocent words such as ‘neck’ and ‘nose’ are used to imply sexual body parts, and even the pronunciation of the single letter ‘n’ may be used suggestively. What the majority of these entries reveal however is not simply the sauciness and ribaldry of Shakespeare’s language, but his amazing power of coining metaphors and the spectacular profundity of his imagination.

This is one of the first volumes in Routledge’s re-issue of books which have established themselves as classics. They are now available for those who missed them first time round, and for a younger generation for whom the authors are just frequently-cited names in bibliographies.

Because they have now acquired the status of ‘set texts’, the current editions have been given introductions, prefaces, and notes which place them in historical context and offer a scholarly apparatus which make them even more valuable than their original editions.

All Partridge’s books are a joy to read, and this is no exception. This is a handsomely produced book – well designed and printed, and very good value at the price. It’s a series which deserves to prosper.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, London: Routledge Classics, 2001, pp.291, ISBN: 0415254000


Filed Under: Slang Tagged With: Dictionaries, Eric Partridge, Language, Reference, Shakespeare, Slang

The Life of Slang

March 9, 2012 by Roy Johnson

where slang comes from, and what it’s used for

The Life of Slang is a study of linguistic creation. We know that when a slang word is introduced into the language, it can become Standard English if it is adopted by enough people and put into general use. And of course the reverse can happen when a Standard English term is used in a new way and thereby becomes slang – which is what’s happened to the term gay since the end of the nineteenth century. In fact the process can continue, and by re-adoption the slang word is taken back into Standard English as a legitimate and additional meaning of the term.

The Life of SlangPeople commonly object to slang when it is first introduced – particularly if it comes from another country such as Australia or the United States. But then resistance weakens (among some groups) and people become late adopters and start to embarrass their children by employing slang which is not a natural part of their verbal register – which is why the elderly Duchess of Cornwall made herself ridiculous by describing the engagement of her stepson (and future king of England) as ‘wicked’.

Another popular misconception is that the English language is somehow ‘infected’ by slang from other languages. This is simply not true. Some terms are found useful and adopted, others are not. You don’t hear English people using ditzy, which is a perfectly normal American term for silly or scatterbrained. And Americans refer slightingly to their own lower-class as ‘trailer trash’ not ‘chavs’. Both countries are selective about the terms they wish to borrow and use.

There’s also a longstanding belief that the use of slang impoverishes somebody’s verbal skills or their range of diction. Once again, there is no evidence to support this belief. Slang is simply an additional tool for communication which is used to mark attitudes to a topic or membership of a group. In fact all speakers can switch in and out of a variety of linguistic registers with no trouble. This is an endemic feature of language use.

In this very readable study of slang, Julie Coleman examines the way in which slang is formed – which turns out to be the same way as Standard English, through word-combination, back formation, and borrowings.

How it’s imported from other countries is a different matter. She puts a great deal of store on cross fertilization between British and American troops during the first world war – but this doesn’t seem altogether convincing, given the brevity of contact between the two forces.

There’s an analysis of literary texts from Chaucer onwards that seeks to provide evidence for her claim that the use of slang increases as time goes on. In fact she claims that slang was not commonly used before the renaissance, but admits that she has no evidence to prove it. She also covers slang from other English-speaking countries – Australia, New Zealand Canada, and even India

A great deal of her exposition is a historical account of underworld cant taken to Australia by transported British felons – and despite Australian national pride, developed from the early nineteenth century onwards. Australia is particularly rich in slang since it receives its linguistic influences from two English-speaking sources – both Britain and the United States.

There is a blurred distinction between slang and colloquialism or idiom which is not always easy to disentangle. Words such as wonga and moolah are not used for anything other than slang terms for money, whereas words such as knob and beef can be used in their conventional senses of handle and meat, as well as their common use as slang terms.

She covers terms generated by the press, the music hall, cinema, pop music, television, and radio – with a generous nod to Round the Horne which ‘preserved one form of slang [Polari] that might otherwise have fallen from use altogether’.

She finishes with a survey of the most rapidly developing field of new terms of all – computer technology and its users. The Internet is the ultimate democratic medium and also the most immediate. Events on one side of the world may now be made known on the other as they are happening – via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and video depositories such as YouTube.

Online dictionaries of slang compiled in the form of Wikis are known to vary greatly in their reliability and quality. Nevertheless, she gives a very respectful account of the user-generated Urban Dictionary. Then, after this fairly exhaustive survey she concludes by re-examining what is required in order to define slang – and it’s not easy.

It’s not necessarily new, or linguistically unusual, or associated with uneducated people, or necessarily vulgar. It’s not just colloquial language taken to an extreme. It doesn’t include dialect or jargon, although local and professional slang do occur. It doesn’t include swearing, though some swearing is slang. Neither is it restricted to the spoken language to the extent that it once was. It isn’t necessarily used for deliberate effect. Slanginess isn’t a quality of words or meanings: what’s slang in one context wouldn’t be slang in another.

In the end she opts to describe it as an attitude to language use which is recognised by fellow users in certain groups. This might seem disappointing to those seeking the reassurance of a quasi-scientific definition. But it strikes me as a step forward, a clearing of the decks from what was once thought to be a simple matter of making word lists and labelling the contents ‘slang’.

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&copy Roy Johnson 2012


Julie Coleman, The Life of Slang, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp.354, ISBN: 0199571996


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Filed Under: Grammar, Language, Language use, Slang Tagged With: English language, Language, language studies, Slang, The Life of Slang

Txtg: The Gr8 Db8

June 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

text messaging analysed, described, and defended

Ever since Text messaging first began there have been moans and complaints that it was lowering standards of literacy, corrupting our youth, and bringing about the collapse of Western civilization. Even the normally rational John Sutherland, writing in the Guardian, complained about texting:

Linguistically, it’s all pigs ear … it masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness. Texting is penmanship for illiterates.

Txtg: The Gr8 Db8David Crystal has answers for every one of these common objections. Texting isn’t even that new: writing in abbreviated forms has been around for a long time. Other languages (such as Hebrew and Arabic) do not use vowels as part of their writing system. In actual fact, the amount of abbreviating and acronyms such as ROFL is quite small. And most convincing of all to me, users in other languages all follow more or less the same ‘rules’ for abbreviation.

What’s more, the use of pictograms and logographs have been around for a long time; the rebus or word puzzle is an ancient tradition in UK and other cultures; and reducing terms to their initial letters is deeply enshrined in our culture – as in pm, NATO, eg, asap, OK, and GHQ.

The same is true for omitting letters, or ‘clipping’ as it’s known technically. Mr and Mrs are cases in point. Any form of word shortening makes complete sense in an SMS system, and nobody has any problem failing to recognise Tues(day), approx(imately), biog(raphy), mob(ile), gov(ernment), poss(ible), and uni(versity.

Crystal has a good chapter on the amazing literary aspirations of the SMS poets and writers – people who compose haikus, short stories, and even serial novels using this extraordinarily restricted form.

In terms of users, women are more adept and enthusiastic than men, and another interesting feature he reveals is that text messaging was late to take off in the USA – for two reasons. One was that phone calls were cheaper there, and the other is that many people need to drive to get about, unlike European countries and Japan, where the country is smaller and more people use public transport.

The content of text messages varies from personal greetings and co-ordinating social activity to political electioneering, advertising, and even schemes to quit smoking. Crystal lists plenty of examples which I imagine will be good stimulus material for the A level students doing language projects who will find this book particularly useful.

At a more advanced level, he also looks at how other languages handle text messaging. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that all of them do more or less the same thing, though some even mix English abbreviations with their own language – which is called ‘code-mixing’. This is an example from German:

mbsseg = mail back so schnell es geht (‘as fast as you can’)

He ends by allaying the fears of all those who think text messaging lowers any kind of standards of literacy, or communication. In fact the reverse is true. And to prove that he’s done his homework he ends with a huge glossary of terms and multiple lists of text message abbreviations in eleven different languages. U cnt gt btr thn tht!

© Roy Johnson 2009

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David Crystal, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.256, ISBN: 0199571333


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Filed Under: Language use, Media, Slang Tagged With: Communication, Grammar, Language, Media, Technology, Text messaging, Texting

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