When the Regime
commanded the unlawful books to be burned,
teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires.
Then a banished writer, one of the best,
scanning the list of excommunicated texts,
became enraged: he'd been excluded!
He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath,
to write fierce letters to the morons in power —
Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen —
Haven’t I always reported the truth?
Now here you are, treating me like a liar!
Burn me!
Bertolt Brecht (1933)
(translated by Michael R. Burch)
Roald Dahl's publisher has defended changes to the books, saying it has a ‘significant responsibility’ to protect young readers…Puffin Books justified the bowdlerising of #RoaldDahl by noting that his books were ‘written many years ago.’
Twitter 2023
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No, I am not the best of anything, nor that much of a writer by the calculus of current standards and demands, though faut de mieux, the dictionary to which I have given my life may be. (And if I am banished, that is another, coincidental story and one that I shall not tell. Even if my exile is from the only place I yearn to be.) And I am dedicated: I mean how many people are about to toss 40+ years into slang’s inexhaustible maw? Meanwhile, colours long nailed to the mast, I work on. Size counts in lexicography and it gets ever larger as each day passes (all smut wholly intended, even if I have omitted the lexicographical version of dick pics). Meanwhile, as far as I know, neither my books, nor the server which offers my on line lexicon, have been subjected to arson, politically motivated or otherwise.
So back to our moutons.
This is a (somewhat broadbrush) taxonomy of slang’s leading obsessions according to my own researches (the numbers indicate relevant headwords, all counts gradually increase with additional research):
Crime and Criminals 5012; Drink, Drinks, Drinking and Drunks 4589; Drugs 3976; Money 3342; Women (almost invariably considered negatively or at best sexually) 2968; Fools and Foolish 2403; Men [1] (of various descriptions, not invariably, but often self-aggrandizing) 2183; Commercial Sex & Sellers 2007; Sexual Intercourse 1818; Terms of Racial or National abuse (including ‘white’): 1783; Homosexuals (male and female)/-ity 1700; Penis: 1441; Policeman / Policing 1246; Vagina 1180; Beat or Hit 1079; Varieties of Vocalizing 958; Masturbate/-ion 945; Mad 926; Die, Death, Dead 831; Anus or Buttocks 728; Defecate/-ion & Urinate/-ion 557; Kill or Murder 521; Promiscuous / Promiscuity 448; Unattractive 392; Oral Sex 334; Fat 282; Anal Sex 267; STDs 255; Swearing and Oaths 253; Vomiting 227.
As I have suggested on many occasions: humanity at its most human. The lexis of the unfettered id rather than the self-restrained superego.
Given slang’s nature, there was a time when I pondered the labelling of every qualifying term, whether headword or sense, with the abbreviation ‘derog.’ for derogatory [2]. One would identify racism, sexism, a range of phobias (e.g. homo-, xeno-), various bodily organs and what we did with them, usually as rubbed together or relieving themselves of something unpleasant and/or malodorous, all of those words considered ‘obscene’ by a world wherein such judgements still conferred brownie points and kindred advancement. One might spell out grubby double entendres, puns, all examples of lexical nudge-nudgery.
I may have even started. Look at the database in its on-line manifestation, and there are a good few ‘derog.’s on offer. Just under 1000 candidates. But there are upwards of 165,000 entries: headwords, senses, compounds, derivatives, phrases and the rest. The allegedly guilty parties make for just 0.606060606061% of the slang lexis. But when I tried to take this to its logical end, to take each and every example of a term that might in some way undermine, belittle, smear, stereotype or reduce, then that percentage rocketed upwards. Was there a page, now screen within my work that might appear unmodified? A column? An entry? If ‘derog.’ was intended to bring readers up with a jerk, to point out that of which they needed to be aware, to warn off and judge as guilty, then the seemingly endless repetition completely negated its aim. Too much, far, far too much, of a vast range of what even I, hardened over the years, must accept are negatives. I abandoned the quest. Let people judge for themselves. (I have maintained that position in other books, I find that people prefer to be given instructions. I remain disinterested, I am not the prefect type).
Nothing is of course consistent, and yes, I maintained indicators of the gross racism, the inescapable sexism, but drew a line thereafter. It is these that have produced the derog. labels I note above. If you find words for fat, crazy or stupid unbearable, then please make your own annotations, but not among my pixels. Nor do I allow that cloying self-censorship – variations on the theme of -word , which like the much older excision of offending sections of an obscenity (c**t, b****r, m**********r, etc.), a practice that echoed a similar blanking of the inner workings of proper names when appearing in potentially actionable contexts (older again, conjured up by the writer Tom Brown around 1700), merely illumine the allegedly offensive term beneath a blockbuster’s array of HMIs. [3]
Looking at that taxonomy, we might assume that it holds a pretty wide lien on the possibilities of linguistic offence. Yet there is more. I have not included, say, religions: with fewer than 500 slang terms between them, whether the rivalrous superstitions themselves, their senior or beneficed members, their worshippers or places of worship, the god-botherers of every type are relatively minor players. Yet, even if via proxy forms, slang takes the names of their lords in vain and as such many would claim qualifies as worthy of both censure and the blue pencil (or worse) of the censor who wields it. Nor have I bothered with conferring or suffering fear, for which slang offers a scant 196 entries, nor and this surprises me, adultery, good for a mere 72.
Now, as seen in what some term ‘political correctness’/‘PC’ and, since PC is so Nineties, others, more recent, ‘woke’, we have a new glossary of spoken sinfulness. In many cases it is playing catch-up, cutting off tolerance to what was dismissed as ‘banter’ and excused as ‘You can’t take a joke.’ Slang quite often plays double duty. Especially as regards race and sex. Bodily parts and functions and sex, though perhaps ‘cis’ and ‘hetero-normative’ activities that fail to embrace the wide spectrum of LGBTQIA2S+ subsets find less tolerance. What were once simple critiques, near-kindly or at least supposedly neutral teases (though the speaker and their target are unlikely to maintain the same levels of tolerance here), aimed at the fat, the foolish and the funny (‘peculiar’ rather than ‘ha-ha’), are plucked from their attendant discourse like still wriggling flies from soup, held up for excoriation, then conducted forthwith to the nearest abecederal abattoir.
The progress of lexical taboo is well established: blasphemy (thus all those olde worlde-sounding terms such as zounds! oddsbodkins! slid! and the euphemistic rest) till maybe 1700; parts of the body and their sexual/excretory functions (18th century onwards, as English refined itself and candidates for slang dictionaries, often simply euphemisms for more challenging locutions, spoken, written and yet to come, would multiply) and, as the former category gradually waned, the strictures, let us call them ‘PC/woke’ and focused now on racism and sexism in all their many flavours, plus a range of insults based on perceived mental or physical defects, from the 1960s onwards, with an acceleration and intensification as the 20th century turned.
The dictionary world also saw contention, but that concerned theory rather than individual words (though inclusion or lack of it played a role). The classic struggle between prescriptive and descriptive lexicography – the first aiming for a perfected version of the language, as promoted by the Académie française or the American Heritage Dictionary, while the second opted for a comprehensive one, as seen in the OED or in America’s Webster’s Third edition of 1961 – is largely concluded. [4] Self-appointed language dictators, claiming to ‘know best’ will always demand that a dictionary has a duty to promote only what is perceived, if not perfect, then certainly ‘good’. It presumably makes them happy, though their demands are rarely if ever met.
The greatest brouhaha generated by Webster III was the inclusion of the word ‘ain’t’. The apostrophe was the least of it. More recent complaints worry less about apostrophes and more, among much else that once caused little if any difficulty, about what were once called ‘aliens’. While terms such as jew, used as a verb and meaning to cheat, to drive a hard and deliberately unfair bargain, have brought complaints since the 1920s, most of the nationalist and race-based lexis has not. Nor have the wide range of insults. The liberal mindset, intensifying and developing in its scope since the Sixties, began to shake that complacent edifice. Campaigns arrived on dictionary doorsteps to see off many terms and definitions that had hitherto been included without comment. Woman is perhaps the most contentious as things stand, originally in the context of feminism, more recently of transsexuality. That debate is far from concluded.
Those campaigns continue and however vehement in their promotion of the social side of the phenomenon, refuse to be satisfied by allowing linguistic inclusiveness similar latitude. Peccant usage is to be excised, contentious words, if permitted to survive, are to be rewritten and redefined. Such namby-pamby concepts as allowing the lexicographers to do their descriptive job, drawing on the vast range of practical examples of actual use that are now available, are barely acknowledged. The idea that the dictionary records what we do say, and not what some self-appointed ‘authority’, brandishing a fresh-minted, ephemeral list of ‘rules’, demands that we should say (and equally so should not say) is of course left unconsidered.
Given a slang dictionary’s magnificent assembly of what, for once and once only, I shall term ‘dirty’ words - a sort of concordance to 1984’s ‘Pornosec’ - one might have expected censorship’s scourers to have descended, purgative zeal on high, finger poised over delete key. After all, and quite shameless, I offer users this and this and this as well. Nor just the word itself, but line after line of unswerving illustration. And so much more besides. Reprehensible stuff. I feel the flames and deservedly so.
Yet, with one minor exception (a Florida school board I believe, unhappy about Christ! terms in the 2010 hard-copy edition) my dictionary has never received a complaint (there have been corrections, more than a few, and I am grateful - my own researches have also shown up my inevitable errors and of course the concept of ‘first use’ is ever-mutable - but no demands for gelding). Nor yet the Timelines of Slang (https://thetimelinesofslang.tumblr.com — launched in 2013 with 1000+ synonyms apiece for both varieties of cock [5] and 1,750 for the old in and out; and since then creating further Timelines for most of the taxonomy above). Nor, looking back at the work of my predecessors, can I find any examples of excision, whether by the ideologically zealous or the morally self-regarding. [6] If dictionaries have suffered censorship, it is when aimed at their mainstream versions.
This is paradoxical. Are we to assume that had Brecht’s exiled writer been compiling a lexicon of rotwelsch, the 16th century German criminal slang (what contemporary England termed cant), it might be that, unless he was some variety of soon to be disposable untermensch, he might have been permitted to stay in Germany celebrating the volkisch aspects of underworld speech (though it permits an excess of Yiddish, even Hebrew). Would Leni Riefenstahl have recruited bronzed half-naked youth and plaited, dirndled mädchen to parade as jovial pickpockets, whores, conmen, muggers and pimps? Sehr gemütlich, no doubt.
Volkisch…gemütlich? Any room for kitsch? The point is that slang, and thus its dictionaries, has a role to play and is permitted to do so. [7] Licensed jester? A little blue. Naughty but nice? Well, not that nice, and it depends quite what you mean by naughty [8] , but how about…scapegoat? Somewhere, at least in lexical terms, to pile all our wickedness, our evil assessments, our unconstrained commentaries, what, as Jonathan Meades has put it, what we really think, not what we are constrained to think: that cussed, irrepressible humanity.
Maybe it’s all too rich for the sensitivity reader, that well-intentioned inquisitor de nos supposedly enlightened, liberal jours. Certainly, for all the seething justifications she or he might find therein, every line demanding that I pull the cat from its baize sack and decorate my errant flesh with a striped jacket, none of language’s shochets has yet to cast an eye in my direction. Nor at any of my colleagues. Neither does its mohel: slang is quite entire: not just testicles, but foreskin in place. OK, we are hardly a substantial target, but one might have…hoped. God knows we need the sales. The nearest I have had, the Floridans aside, was a junior editor (British) informing me that the term ‘#MeToo’ as used by a man (I was writing of the admirably mouthy Wife of Bath and noting the absence of such hashtaggery from her day) made her feel ‘uncomfortable.’ Well, I’ll go to the foot of my stairs, to use (I have always thus wished) that fine Yorkshire expression. Kinder, dare I say, than many terms my database might have offered me.
Such agglomerations of the naughtier end of the lexis, like the ‘bookshops’ and brothels that go to make up the ‘red light districts’ of the world’s big cities, are permitted, albeit, or so those who extend permission claim, reluctantly. Like the state-run French maisons tolerées of an earlier era, the smarter maisons closes (a term, since a former working girl turned campaigner Marthe Richard – biting that organ that had presumably fed her – had them shut in 1946, is now seemingly linked only to an upmarket lingerie store) or the grim maisons d’abattage, the ‘slaughterhouses’ where girls who rebelled against pimps or madams were sent to service dozens of the poorest clients each day and which were often sited near to the city’s actual abbatoirs whose employees queued for the pleasures of a different sort of flesh), slang dictionaries are permitted. Repositories of the forbidden, whether offered as elegantly constructed witticisms, the lexical equivalent of Edward VII’s sex chair, kept at La Chabannais, one of the grandest of lupanars, or tossed out as the most rancid examples of the ‘gutter tongue’, stashed either between hard covers or more recently online, they are accessible, but never mandatory.
And like Brecht’s scholar, I would like to think that neither I nor they offer lies.
[1] It should be noted that while slang may not be a completely ‘man-made’ language, the default figure, whether gazing or gazed at, is the male. So there is case for seeing, say, insults aimed at the stupid or the drunken, as by default embracing men, if not only, then first. Only when sex enters the game do women properly get to play.
[2] Derogatory, from Latin derogatorius, ‘one who derogates; one who diminishes or takes from the authority of anything’ (OED). The fear, as always lies behind censorship, that an established hierarchy – especially that of which one is a member - is under attack. No more a concrete aspect of the word in question, than such agglomerations of vowels and consonants can be characterised as ‘dirty’. Though to what extent slang’s lists of synonyms, for stupid, ugly, mad, defecation, vomiting or anal sex diminish or reduced anything in the way of ‘authority’ defeats me. We do not, for instance, salute turds, other than as, in their all too common human embodiment, such individuals demand that we should. And back we come to the censor.
[3] Hydrargyrum Medium-Arc Iodide, a type of light which uses an arc lamp instead of an incandescent bulb to produce light, currently rated the most powerful light for movie-making.
[4] That a major revision of Webster was attacked for unseemly liberalism has a certain irony (though it was many years since Noah himself had had an influence on the text). Among the many accusations that he ranged against his bête-noire, the English Samuel Johnson (there was a US one too, another, but lesser dictionary man), was that of allowing a wide range of terms that ought, in any decent lexicon, to have been automatically excluded. Johnson was commissioned to set language in stone, but the Yankee represents, far more than the pragmatic Englishman, the lexicographer as law-giver.
[5] Cock, as in the shape and function of a tap, works for penis; cock, from French coquille, a cockleshell or cowrie, for vagina. The former recorded since 1450, the latter from 1833 and mainly in the US South, used by both major races, although the earliest examples are English.
[6] That said, my predecessor Eric Partridge, professing himself unhappy with the grosser obscenities (‘I I had to force myself to overcome an instinctive repugnance’), opted for the masking apostrophe in his earlier editions. However he also followed what he found in the OED, which did not. This led to absurdities: the first edition (1937) of his major work spelled out shit à la OED, but retained, just lines away, the asterisk for such terms, e.g. sh*t-stirrer, which Clarendon Street ignored. In fairness, he abandoned the practice in later editions. As for the original OED, it rejected fuck and cunt, but managed a good selection of their peers. The omissions would be remedied as revised supplements appeared from 1972-86.
[7] The dialect collectors, whether the Englishman Joseph Wright in 1907 or the American Frederick Cassidy eighty years later, are also accorded a licence denied their mainstream peers. Like slang, dialect lies on the linguistic margin; so long as it makes no effort to infiltrate the centre, then it can be left to its own coarse devices. If slang is urban slumming, dialect is a visit to the rowdier sort of country pub.
[8] naughty, n. 1. the vagina. 2. sexual intercourse. 3. in pl., sexual liaisons. 4. a crime. 5. an injury. adj. 1. of money, counterfeit. 2. flashy, vulgarly over-dressed. 3. criminal, violent, corrupt. 4. usu. of prostitutes, promiscuous, amoral. 5. malfunctioning, sick. 6. problematic, disturbing. naughty, v. to have sexual intercourse.