Literary Leicester

I'm doing a talk at Literary Leicester on student slang on the 9th of November, and you can read an extract from The Life of Slang here.

A few more reviews

I've had a few online notices from American reviewers: from VisualThesaurus and one from Just Books Only. Not quite as positive as the British reviews, but for predictable reasons. There's going to be one in Library Journal too, but I can't provide a link to that.

More publicity

Here (again, for my benefit rather than anyone else's), is another item in the Huffington Post.

The invention of ream

You won't go many weeks without hearing or reading that such and such a person or group invented a particular slang word. You probably accept this information with mild interest, perhaps meaning to mention it to someone else later. Maybe you'll remember to mention it, and the next person will also tuck it away for future reference and in no time at all it will have become 'fact'.

Really, though, no one individual can invent slang because slang only works in a social setting. I can make up a word (schlargle) and use it repeatedly every day of my life, but that just makes me a weirdo unless other people take it up. And if it's taken up by a group of my close friends and no-one else, then we're probably just a bunch of weirdos. It's not slang until it spreads more widely.

You may have come across the word ream (or reem), as used by Joey Essex of TOWIE (The Only Way is Essex). Because ream wasn't in common use when it was uesd on TOWIE, lots of people have assumed that Mr Essex made it up. He didn't. Jonathon Green's Green's Dictionary of Slang has a first example of use from 1859, from John Camden Hotten's Dictionary of Modern Slang, and although it doesn't seem to have been widely used until now, that certainly suggests that it isn't a modern invention. In fact, ream may be a variant of rum, originally underworld slang for  "excellent" (though it has also been used to mean "odd, suspicious" by more law-abiding types). Rum is first found in Thomas Harman's Caveat for Common Curistors ("Warning for Common Vagabonds"), where it is spelt <rome>. Green says that it is probably from the name of the city, but the OED sticks with 'origin unknown'.

The point is, anyway, Joey Essex didn't make ream up, but he can take credit for bringing it to wider attention and popularizing it. This kind of misattribution often happens with slang: if we haven't heard a word before we assume that the person we hear using it is the person who invented it (my children and my students make this assumption all the time, usually wrongly). Unfortunately, we're not all as near to the centre of the world as we might like to think.

For other spurious slang creators, see Adam Tod Brown on hip hop slang and Grant Barrett on Daniel Cassidy's book (which is a whole other story).

manwhore

It has long been a truism of gender studies that there are more terms for promiscuous women than promiscuous men. The terms for women tend to be rather more negative in tone (slut, whore, slang) than the terms for men (lady-killer, player, stud). Not only that, but perfectly innocent words for women have a tendency to develop sexual meanings. For example, slapper used to mean "a large clumsy woman", hussy is directly derived from housewife, and harlot originally meant "a travelling entertainer". But surely this isn't true anymore. Surely there's no longer a sexual double standard now that we're all equal and everything is fair.

I was interested to hear my students using the word manwhore to describe a promiscuous male. It is nowhere to be seen in the OED, but blog evidence suggests that in 2005 it was used to mean "male prostitute", regardless of the gender of his customers. Perhaps it began to acquire wider visibility and more positive connotations by association with a Los Angeles rock band that won 'Best Artist of the Year' in the Los Angeles Music awards in 2005, but there have also been songs and books with manwhore in their titles, so it would be hard to say exactly why it came to be more commonly used. By the end of 2006, manwhore was being used to mean "a promiscuous male", always with negative connotations. There's no denying that the negative connotations are still normal in blogs and tweets, but a note of admiration does sometimes creep in, and there are at least two bloggers who label themselves as manwhores without implying that they take money in return for sex (it may be significant that one is a teenage boy).

Just in case you're wondering, whore very rarely has positive connotations.

Living on the edge

Slang sees a particularly high turnover in intensifiers (words that do the same thing as very). For example, if you want to say that something is very good, you can choose between: mega good (since 1968), totally good (1972) well good (since at least 1986), or bare good, ra good, dead good, proper good, and total good. The ones without dates aren't yet listed in the OED and there are probably more that I've missed here, as well as the various swear-words that could slot in before good, like bloody (1676), fucking (1898), and so on. Really good isn't slang in itself, but it starts to sound like slang when it's used often enough, and particularly with heavy emphasis in a posh accent.

This isn't anything new: slang and colloquial intensifiers through the ages have included monstrous (1569, though it wasn't slang to start with), dreadfully (since at least 1616), plaguily (1711),  shockingly (1777), frightfully (1816), gallows (since at least 1823), jolly (1838, or possibly earlier), terribly (since at least 1842), awfully (1859), tremendously (since at least 1863), fearfully (since at least 1878), immensely (1885), perfectly (since about 1915) and bally (1939). It's really hard to pin down when these slangy intensifiers developed, because they usually shade imperceptibly out of a usage that's closer to the etymological meaning, so a lot of these dates are based on interpreting OED citations under a broader definition.

A lot of the earlier intensifiers suggest that there's something frightening or dangerous about anything that's extreme (monstrous, dreadfully, plaguily, dead, and so on). Some later intensifiers suggest largeness of size or completeness of degree without originally implying a value judgement (immensely, perfectly, total(ly)), but the positive intensifiers are relatively modern (jolly, well, proper), and imply that extremeness is a good thing. We're living on the edge, my friend, keeping that envelope well and truly pushed.

raw and harsh

Here's one I hadn't heard before: raw with the meaning "tough, hard; cruel, unfair". Harsh is widely used in more or less the same way. Neither of these uses is listed in the OED, but Green's Dictionary of Slang has a first citation for harsh from 1987, in US college slang, and of raw from 1908.  Has raw spread to the US? Are raw or harsh used in Australian slang? New Zealand? Canadian?

berk

I had a query about the origins of berk "an idiot" too, with a suggestion that it might be related to birkie, a Scottish word for a man, particularly one who's a bit too full of himself or to the verb to burke, which is used literally with the sense "to murder" and figuratively to mean "to hush up; to avoid".
The OED has citations for birkie from 1724 to 1816, but the Dictionary of the Scots Language extends that to about 1930, with birkie also being used to refer to anyone with a quick temper, including women and children. These extended dates are just about late enough for birkie to be a candidate for the origins of berk and the semantic change from "conceited person" to "idiot" is reasonable, but you'll see that there's a stronger candidate.
To burke is from the name of William Burke, an Edinburgh grave-robber who was executed in 1829. The verb was used until at least the 1950s, but the semantic change and grammatical shift from "to murder" to "idiot" are less convincing. Without any evidence to support a connection, we can discount this as a possible origin for berk.
The OED has citations for berk, also spelt birk and burk, from 1929 to 1963, and a quick search on Google Blogs confirms my sense that it's still in use in Britain, though it's now a very mild insult. Please let me know if it's used further afield.
The rhyming slang origins for berk didn't seem terribly convincing at first glance (OED etymology: Berkeley/Berkshire Hunt = cunt), mainly because I hadn't heard of either, but it turns out that both Berkshire and Berkeley have hunts and that they're both jolly famous if you happen to mix in those circles. Berks has been used as an abbreviation for Berkshire since at least 1787 (which is the earliest example I can find in The Times), but Berkshire is pronounced Barkshire, in Britain at least, and its abbreviation is usually pronounced Barks. This means that if we want to make the case that Berkshire Hunt is the origin of berk, we need to assume that this rhyming slang is based on a less prestigious pronunciation (and this wouldn't be an unreasonable position). Members of the Berkshire Hunt call themselves 'Old Berks', but I haven't been able to find early enough evidence to suggest that this is the origin of berk "idiot" rather than a jokey reference to it. I also haven't been able to find any evidence that Berkshire Hunt was ever used in full to mean either "cunt" or "idiot", and I suspect that Berkshire Hunt is only given as a possible etymology in the OED because Julian Franklyn, an authority on rhyming slang, saw it as the more correct form. He mentions to burke when he's discussing berk, but only to say that they're unconnected and that it's necessary to distinguish between the spelling of the two.
The case for Berkeley Hunt as the origins of berk is made all the more compelling by the fact that Berkeley Hunt has also been used with the senses "cunt" and "fool" (OED dates: 1937-1977), sometimes in full, but also in the forms Berkeley and old Berkeley. The earliest citation for berk also includes the fuller form Berkeley Hunt. The OED entries for berk and Berkeley Hunt were written later than Franklyn's dictionary, so he didn't have access to this information.
In conclusion, then, the OED appears to be correct in tracing berk to Berkeley Hunt. This might  have been re-enforced by association with Berkshire Hunt later on, but it looks as if Berkeley Hunt is where the term originally came from.

chav

One result of the  media attention is that I've been getting emails from people who've heard or read about the book, usually about individual words and their histories. Chav is one of these. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), it has been used with the sense "a young person of a type characterized by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a low social status" since 1998.
There's lots of speculation about the origins of chav, usually involving offensive stereotypes about people who live in Chatham. In reality, chav is from chavvy "a baby; a child", which is originally from an Angloromani word of the same meaning. In other words, Romany-speakers in England used chavvy "child" when they were speaking their own language. By 1886 it was being used in English, apparently among homeless people  first (they were known as tramps at the time). From there it spread into wider dialect use in the south of England. It was picked up by the media in about 2004/5 and is now widely used.
You might have heard chavvy in the lyrics of Hersham Boys by Sham 69 or in Only Fools and Horses. Chavvy "child" is well documented, but if you can find an example of chav in its current sense from before 1998 or of chavvy "like a chav" from before 1999, please do let me know.

The Life of Slang

My book is getting a fair bit of media coverage just now, so I thought it would be useful to draw the links together (this is for my benefit more than anyone else's). The Life of Slang has been reviewed in We Love This Book, The Observer, The Independent and (behind a paywall) in the Sunday Times. I also got a mention in The Sun, but don't take those dates too seriously. There's a review on Mantex which misunderstands the relationship between UK and US troops in WWI: the earliest Americans in the war joined British forces, so naturally they picked up existing British slang -- you can access Jonathan Lighter's glossary to look at the evidence if you're a subscriber. I've been mentioned in various blogs, including That's Books, The Virtual Linguist, WilliamFlew and The blog formerly known as ... English Language @ SFX.

Incidentally, here are the blogs mentioned in the book: Bock the Robber and Gorilla Convict.

I've written about slang on the OxfordWords blog, The Huffington Post and We Love This Book, and you can also hear me on The Today programme. There are podcasts on YouTube on What Is Slang?, How Slang Spreads and 27 Ways to Say Groovy.