Big News From the Slang Guy

When I saw the following tweet from Jonathon Green -- aka Mister Slang -- I have to admit I was worried.

"@gdoslang” was a reference to Green’s magum opus, Green’s Dictionary of Slang. It was published in three volumes in the United Kingdom in 2010 and in the United States in 2011. Then, two years ago, Green brought it online as a fully searchable, periodically updated website. It is a historical dictionary with, at last count, 55,000 headwords; 1,278 derivatives; 18,776 compounds; 19,880 phrases; and 640,451 illustrative citations. I concur with the opinion of Journal of English Language and Linguistics, expressed in the screen shot of Green’s home page, at the top of this post. In its comprehensiveness and historical emphasis, it resembles the Oxford English Dictionary, with the proviso that the OED has a large staff, and GDOS is the project of just one man.

The OED and GDOS are two of the online sources I am continually consulting when writing Lingua Franca posts or just satisfying my curiosity about a question of language. The others are The New York Times archives; Urban Dictionary; Wikipedia; Twitter; the Brigham Young University corpora; the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America database of historical U.S. newspapers; and four Google services -- the main search engine, the Books and News databases, and the Ngram Viewer application. Green’s is the only one-person operation of these, and it’s one of just two, along with the Times, for which I gladly pay cash money. (I get access to the OED through my erstwhile employer, the University of Delaware.)

So you can understand that I got a little apprehensive when I read that Jonathon Green had “AN IMPORTANT NOTICE” to share. Fortunately, the news turned out to be not only not bad, but amazing. Here it is, in Green’s words: “I have decided that the dictionary in its entirety – headwords, etymologies, definitions and citations – will henceforth be made available for free.” (Previously, a bare-bones version without etymologies and citations was available for no charge.)

He went on to say that those 640,000-plus citations were the main reason for the change.

Not everyone needs such material on every occasion, but it seems to me that everyone should have the opportunity to consult it. This will now be possible.

In an ideal or perhaps older world, the work might have gained institutional backing, the usual means being a publisher. But I have come long since to accept that no publisher, even including the one who (reluctantly, as they made clear) put out the print edition in 2010, feels that the work is of value or worth. No matter; death will see me off, dismissal will not. I have no choice but to continue alone and in so doing, what truly matters is visibility.

So ego, of course, enters the picture: one does the work, one wishes it to be seen and used. Otherwise one becomes nothing more than an ever-older old man, sitting in a small room, tracking down new words for, inter alia, masturbation.

Green said that the change was scheduled to take place on Monday, Guy Fawkes Day. So assuming all the technical issues got resolved, go on over there and give it a spin. Meanwhile, in honor of the day and the move, here’s a taste of what GDOS has to say about the durable piece of slang Guy Fawkes inspired -- guy. (The links are to earlier Lingua Franca posts on the subject.)

The word guy, to refer to a person, first shows up in Britain to mean “a fool"; here are the earliest citations. You can click on the image to see it bigger and clearer. (Green helpfully has a flag next to each cite to indicate the country it came from, which lets us see that the first recorded U.S. use came in 1859.)

The more general, neutral use of the term shows up first in 1880 in Punch, but most subsequent uses through the 20th century are American. (And indeed, guy is one of the favorite supposed Americanisms the British love to hate.)

And finally, to the issue of guy being used to refer to females as well as males -- which some people nowadays find recent and annoying -- GDOS has some great early citations.

There are some 55,000 other words to explore, and now, everyone can explore them free of charge.

Thanks, big guy.