Sticking out your gyat for the rizzler

Tempus, fuck it!

An Old Lexicographer Speaks: WTF?

‘Sticking out your gyat for the rizzler
You're so skibidi
(Haha Jonathan!)
You're so Fanum Tax
I just wanna be your sigma
Freaking come here
Give me your Ohio’

Real Wayne

_____________________________

So maybe the time has come.

We had a deal, slang and me. I put in the time, gave it my life, and it repaid me in pleasure, in the joy of exploration and discovery and in passing on what I had found. On the good days I could even allow myself to feel that the work, if not the worker, had improved a tiny chunk of the world’s knowledge. To say (and sometimes out loud too) that I was doing the thing I was meant to do. It permitted me to substitute its name for my own and in return I gave it the respect that too many, blinded by stereotype, refused to see and represented its value as far and as wide as I could. But maybe having passed and my life gone with it, the time has also arrived.

The time? That time. The one that was always over the horizon and never needed the slightest acknowledgement, but somehow, and let’s be frank not remotely surprisingly, you also preferred not to look that hard, but forty years have passed and it has crept up and is staring at you eye to eye and I fear that you are the one whose optics will glance away the first.

Forty years or thereabouts. Let us return to around 35, fifty per cent of the once-canonical three score and ten. You had wound up your involvement in what was called (tell me it was ironically) the ‘counter-culture’, the ‘underground’ and, please, the ‘alternative society’ and had become very bored of knocking out dictionaries of quotations aka books of cracker mottos created by celebrity authors (historical, contemporary, whatever) that you happened to like and which had thus gained a patina of dignity. Last Words, Sport, Politics, Food, Love. All good fun. One or two even made some money. But the ODQ they weren’t.

So who’s arguing? Its the thing not the date that matters and the thing was that one day you had looked and seen and thought. And the subject of all this focus was a book called A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English which had come out in 1937 and was now in its I don’t know which, lets say 7th edition, which appeared around 1970 and was written by an old guy whose cover pic showed white hair (longish as purported his generation’s intellectuals), an overcoat and maybe a cigarette and a blurb which praised ‘The Word King’ and his name was Eric Partridge and a little research showed that he had been born in 1894 and was now a serious septuagenarian and come 1979 his clogs would be popped, his checks cashed, his dinner pail handed in and choose which you like of slang’s 700+ synonyms that deal with death. He began life in New Zealand, a farmer’s son, came to France with the Anzacs to fight on the Somme and stayed in post-war London first as a publisher and when that went tits-up thanks to the 1930s Depression, made himself into the best-known anglophone slang collector of the mid-20th century. He learned, as all of us who share his craft have done, as he went along. His fans anointed him the Word King, even if the words were a tiny subset of the greater English language and his kingdom was his invariable seat M1 in the old British Museum Reading Room.

Meanwhile I was young. Born in 1948, a Jew, not the pedlar type but, it would turn out, the other variety: the half-assed Talmudic scholar. A good liberal and imbued with everything we believed was meant by ‘the Sixties’, which we shall term drugs and sex and rock ‘n’ roll in all its multifarious variations. Among such attainments came, of course, the era’s slang. No, I, and I was not alone, failed to realise that what the press termed ‘hippie slang’ was in fact a reheated take on the usual story - an invention some decades earlier of African-Americans and already diluted by beats and beatniks who, like hippies, were predominantly white. Yes, that made it cultural appropriation, but if that term emerged in 1945 (so says the OED) then the initial reference was to ‘the Orient’ and what were still termed ‘Negro cultural ingredients’ didn’t join the party till 1968 and the phrase was still very much an academic construct. We just talked the talk.

My point? Partridge, King of the Words, scored very low on those we, five decades his junior, knew and used. He knew little of dope (and his definitions branded all and every user, from smokers to pill-poppers, as ‘addicts’) nor rock ’n’ roll and as for sex admitted that he found its vocabulary distasteful, and in his early editions at least he attempted to soften the obscenities, which often dealt with variations on the old in-and-out, with asterisks that, of course, merely spotlighted that which he wished to mask. As for post World War II, when American slang, which as his title made clear had no place in his researches but played a major, even an increasingly dominant role within the greater slangs of the English speaking-world, he didn’t want to know. If one looked in his pages for the state of slang’s art, that used by my contemporaries, all there was seemed to derive from a single newspaper piece, perhaps in the Observer which liked that kind of content, in 1966. It was far from exhaustive, it was not especially accurate. And I knew better. One other impulsion: Yiddish. Specifically the word nafka which, goyisch transcription being what it was, also came as nafkeh, naftkeh, noffgur, noffka and nofker but always meant a prostitute. Partridge knew what, he failed on why. He missed the back story, suggesting - his dictum was ‘something is always better than nothing’ which cheered him but too often satisfied no-one else - a Cockney elision of naughty and girl, tortured into an East End insult. As I say, I knew better. Confident? No, but perhaps as near as I would ever be, and certainly up for presenting a facsimile. I looked, I saw and thought, ‘I can do this.’

The rest has been my history and off I set out into what I have come to call Slang World. I love it dearly, every grubby back alley, run-down housing estate, sordid brothel, squalid tavern, flashy mall, noisy club or dance-hall and every other of its wordy venues. Lexicographer rather than the poem’s original philologist, I too have chased ‘a panting syllable through time and space / Start it at home, and hunt it, in the dark, / To Gaul, to Greece - and into Noah's Ark!’ (The lines date me, but they have a charm). I do it still.

But there’s the prob.

I am nearly Partridge’s terminal age and with it have taken on his failings. I, a boomer (though I would never stretch our birthdays through to 1964, seeing our parents very much as those who had just returned from World War II) do not properly know my successors. If Generations X, Y and Z have me on the ropes, Generation Alpha has put me on the canvas. I wonder whether I shall get up. If I do and drag myself, bleeding, groggy, to the mirror I see not Mr Slang but the long-dead Word King, whose throne I set out so cockily to usurp and who now, as age exerts its laws, I come more and more to resemble. There are, perhaps, more explanatory pieces than he was offered, digital or hard copy, that might help me, but if I can pick up what, I have far less idea of why. There used to be a known security: much slang, however recent, can be reverse engineered. The lexis depends on certain age-old, hard-wired themes: intercourse is man hits woman, the penis a gun a club a knife, call it a boy’s toy, the vagina an irresistable but also dark and scarey hole. Teeth are an option. So it has gone since slang’s earliest 16th century glossaries.

That remains so, but as in much else (and I have surely benefited in so many ways) the net has changed the game. Like Atlas one needs a solid surface upon which to place one’s feet before holding up, or in my case venturing out into the world. The floor, once available in different patterns, textures and colours, but still immutably a floor, is now so much less trustworthy. Is it even a floor? Or just an agglomeration of shape-shifting pixels or one of those rugs, artfully printed to counterfeit a bottomless pit. The memes and gameplay that stand behind such neologisms as those I quote above are beyond alien. I feel equally alien when I set out to understand them and, as is my job, to gather them, with proper explanation and usage examples, in my database. I have always mocked the Urban Dictionary, with its ‘authority’ based on rivalrous thumbs, up and down but nothing judgemental. That to me is no dictionary. But if I can no longer trust myself, if I am merely parrotting nebulous arrangements of the alphabet, with no sense of why and wherefore, how can I keep to my own basic dictates.

I shall not stop, but I am, I have no choice but to confess, more likely to find my successes in the discovery of a term’s history, offering another, older first (recorded) use. That has always been my primary interest, thus the ‘historical principles’ on which I, following the OED work, and now I fear it may have to be a refuge. I have always had a problem with the questioner’s inevitable go-to demand: what’s the hot new slang? On the whole if I fail to answer on cue, it is because I am not desperately interested. After all, wap, meaning to have sex, appears in 1532, with the a turned o, wop is there now, a rap term meaning the same thing. The theme holds: the slap of male flesh on female. Slang, till recently, has not required deep reinvention.

The problem, my problem, is when the paradigm shifts and I have no easy way to follow. No gamer, no meme creator, bereft of the vital cultural backdrop, I cannot charm the bouncer, I am barred from the club, jeered from the VIP room. I am turned shit-for-brains, fuckwit, history. We cannot answer if we no longer know the questions. Slang has always offered itself as a repository of secrets. But we had a deal: not from me.

So maybe the time has come.

Haha Jonathon! indeed.