Books
The word on the street. The English language is continually evolving, as two new slang dictionaries prove. But the best place to learn the meaning of words such as "sketty", "yatty" and "baphead" is on any London bus at 8.30 in the morning
Published 19 December 2005
The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
Edited by Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor Routledge, 2189pp, £99 (to March 2006)
ISBN 0415212588
Cassell's Dictionary of Slang
Edited by Jonathon Green Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1565pp, £30
2005 Blogged: despatches from the blogosphere
Edited by Tim Worstall The Friday Project, 272pp, £8.99
The English language enjoys being ravished once in a while. I say ravished, rather than ravaged: purists may moan, but there's nothing like a good, preferably rude, neologism to reassure you that English speakers enjoy the bendiest and most hair-curling vernacular in the world. Lovers of slang and made-up words should expect their Christmas stocking to be rather heavier than usual, with the publication of two new dictionaries dedicated to what the website www.blogthings.com calls "slanguage".
Slang-chasers such as Terry Victor, a playwright and language fetishist who, along with the lexicographer Tom Dalzell, is editor of The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, are lucky enough to consider the pursuit of new words to be a hobby and a compulsion rather than a job. Lucky, because collecting slang words for publication is the linguistic equivalent of painting the Forth Bridge.
Jonathon Green, who edits Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, has been working on this edition, the second, since the first came out in 1998. Presumably, he's already started on the third. In the months between printing and publication, a whole crop of neologisms will have emerged, now waiting to be captured in the lexicographer's amber before spawning yet another generation of weird new words.
Upon taking delivery of the dictionaries - at several kilos each, they nearly killed the postman - I did the obvious thing and looked up all the rudest words first. I love rude words, possibly because I was a strangely pious child who refused to swear when every other kid at school had a vocabulary that seemed to have been formed exclusively from watching Derek and Clive videos.
Not using slang was a form of rebellion, just as slang itself is a way of rebelling against the conformity of standard language. When I left that "shitehole", to borrow the delicate term of a classmate, to do my A-levels at a more upmarket establishment, I started cursing freely, stinging the ears of nice students who had been brought up to say "flip" and "sugar" when they meant something far worse, like "piss flaps" or - Lord forgive me - "fanny batter".
In both dictionaries there are enough sexual, scatological and base slang words to fill a late-night Channel 4 schedule, but the Partridge version wins out - just - over the more compact Cassell because of the sheer range of its sources. Dalzell and Victor make good use of contemporary vernacular fiction written in the vein of Trainspotting, coming up with dozens of vulgar euphemisms coined by the likes of Kevin Sampson and "the Welsh Irvine Welsh", Niall Griffiths, writer of the wonderfully named 2001 novel Sheepshagger.
The words "minging" - which Sampson uses liberally - and "skanky", both meaning smelly, repugnant or revolting, have become two of the most widely used new slang words in recent years: they are good examples of words that had to be invented, because the existing terms just didn't do justice to the very, well, minginess or skankiness of what needed to be described. In our household, at least, "minging" - part of the unofficial Scots vocabulary for at least 20 years, only moving south in the past ten - has been intensified to become "mingamungous". This is most often used when the bin in the kitchen hasn't been emptied for a few days.
One word I looked up in both slang dictionaries was "sketty". Meaning a girl of tight clothing and loose morals, I first heard it used about five years ago among working-class black teenagers in London. It doesn't appear at all in Partridge, though the dictionary contains 65,000 definitions to Cassell's 12,000, but a close relation, "sketel", turns up in Cassell.
Green cannot put a date or place of origin on the word, but wonders whether it is connected to Catherine "Skittles" Walters, mistress of Edward VII, so nicknamed because "she falls over like a skittle", usually into the nearest bed. "Sketty" has now morphed into "yatty", which also features in Cassell, along with the fabulous "baphead", another word of black British teenage invention, which describes someone so daft that he or she must have a soft bread roll in place of a brain.
Indeed, easily the most fecund source of slang is to be found on any London bus at 8.30 in the morning, where you'll find teenagers of all races and mother tongues tossing English back and forth, making it up as they go along, deliberately mes-sing up words and meanings in order to perplex the old and fogeyish. Their syntax would make Lynne Truss have a fit, but it's too funny to dismiss or ignore. "Your mum chats waffle!" is one of my favourites: it makes the act of "talking rubbish" sound much more worthy of one's scorn. Another is this mystifying exchange between two boys on the top deck of an East End bus:
"I was at this party last night and I was drinkin' sparklin' perry."
"That's your problem, man! You're always cussin'!"
"But all I said was sparklin' perry!"
"There you go again, man! Always cussin'!"
What every cuss-conscious teenager needs to do is visit www.urbandictionary.com, a site dedicated to logging new slang as it spreads from the street to the internet before entering common usage. The entries compiled in 2005 Blog-ged: despatches from the blogosphere show a different side to the phenomenon of "citizen journalism": one that's stuffed with would-be leader writers who comment on the political and social affairs of the day in a style that rarely deviates from BBC English.
As Tim Worstall, editor of 2005 Blogged, complains when introducing Clive Davis's blog entry about nepotism in the media: "One of the things that drives bloggers up the wall is that here we are, turning out reams of copy (of varying quality, to be sure) yet very few seem to be getting picked up by the major media." The inference of his comment seems to be that the bloggers featured in his book publish on the internet only because they can't get a job on a newspaper. You can't make chip paper out of blogs, though, as web pages never really die; they just loiter in archives waiting to be googled (no longer a proper noun but a generic verb, according to Partridge).
The whole point of blogging is meant to be that anyone with an interest in the world around them - even if that world extends only as far as their bedroom walls - can share their wisdom without editorial interference. This can lead to some curious interpretations of the word "communication"; more esoteric music blogs, in particular, delight in putting off casual listeners with a range of obfuscatory terms that could have been invented by the sociopathic record-shop geeks in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity.
Maybe there's a reason why "slang" rhymes with "gang": if you can't understand it, you can't join the club. The blog entries that make up 2005 Blogged are informative and easy to read, but not quite as entertaining as the kind of site which, in the words of the blogger and New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, makes the internet seem "like every drunken conversation come to life". Especially those conducted on sparkling perry.
Lynsey Hanley is writing a book about the history of council estates
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