Leith on language
Sam Leith
Green’s dictionary of the blue
Say what you like about Jonathon Green: the man works his nuts off. He works his ring off. He works like a wop. Any readers who find one or all of the last three epithets offensive might be advised to steer clear of Green’s magnum opus. For he has spent over three decades collecting slang: 30 years at the coalface, by his own confession 24/7/365. And if you think “work like a wop” is offensive, why, there’s plenty more where that came from.
Green’s work on the ruder end of the language spectrum feels especially current now that political debates, both home and abroad, have become so soaked in invective. As he modestly admitted in his memoir two years back, among his upward of 100,000 headwords are 1,351 words for the penis, 1,180 words for the vagina (Donald Trump’s preferred term among them), 1,740 for heterosexual sex alone—and not a single word for love.