Jonathon Green

John Lennon, in his notorious 1970 interview with Jan Wenner, said that ‘nothing happened in the ‘60s except that we all dressed up’. It was classic Lennon - blatant exaggeration which undeniably contained a kernel of truth. Despite all the noise and heat of the 1960s the fundamental structure of society remained unchanged. Indeed, contemporary British society is even more unequal and socially divided than back then. Jonathon Green’s book, however, borrows Lennon’s quote for its show more title but reframes it to more positive effect. In his view, if the 1960s was a sort of glorified fancy dress party, it was a necessary and liberating one after the decades of sacrifice, austerity and conformity which preceded it.

When did the ‘60s start? Not on January 1st 1960, that’s for sure. For Green preparations for the ‘60s blowout began in the ‘50s with the Beats, Angry Young Men and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and it was all over by the early ‘70s, but the festivities were in full swing from about 1965 to 1971; these were the years of the counter-culture and an analysis of the British manifestation of this forms the heart of the book.

The counter-culture or underground or alternative society was easy to recognise but difficult to define. It took its immediate inspiration from America but Green traces its lineage through the upper class rebels of Bloomsbury, Dada, Surrealism and 19th Century Romantics like Shelley. As he makes clear, it was more an attitude and style than a coherent ideology: sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and ‘revolution in the head’. A cultural rather than political alternative to mainstream society it constituted a sort of psychedelic parallel universe with its own newspapers (IT and Oz), institutions (the London Free School, the Antiuniversity and the drug counselling service Release, founded in 1967 and still going strong today), and it’s own hierarchies and leaders (John Hopkins, Richard Neville and Mick Farren). If it was an alternative society it was certainly a very small one, London-centric and overwhelmingly middle class. The 1960s was essentially the revolt of privileged youth; dropping out not being an option for those who were never in to begin with. Behind the revolutionary rhetoric lay considerable entrepreneurial energy and the pioneering vegetarian restaurants, fringe theatres and arts centres of the counter-culture gradually proliferated and became mainstream.

I was fascinated by the mutual antipathy between the hippies and ‘freaks’ of the counter-culture and the more conventional politicos of the New Left. IT published articles attacking the student rebels of the London School of Economics as ‘boring’ and ‘bureaucratic’; and also, rather astonishingly in retrospect, an editorial following the anti-Vietnam War March in March 1968, denouncing the leaders of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (to be fair, many counter-culture figures did take part in the march). The politicos, in their turn, regarded the hippies as self-indulgent and superficial.

Freedom might have been a keyword for both sides but, for the hippies, a socialist state in which every worker was guaranteed a job in a factory was no kind of freedom at all. For them the personal was political and commitment to changing the world demonstrated by lifestyle rather than by spouting ideology. The hippies, in other words, represented a revolutionary form of libertarianism. This can be reduced to the caricature of ‘ I just want to do my own thing, man’, but in a Britain still haunted by the ghost of Queen Victoria, their concern with sexual freedom and personal liberty was by no means trivial.

Ultimately, for all their alleged self-indulgence and superficiality, the hippies were vindicated. The political revolution remained a pipe dream; the cultural and social revolution, albeit in severely compromised form, actually happened. This is where the rather unlikely hero of the book emerges - 1960s Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins. Certainly no hippie, he nonetheless played a pivotal role in liberalising law reforms relating to homosexuality, abortion and censorship. I was rather taken aback by Green’s description of the somewhat staid and sober Jenkins as a ‘visionary’; on reflection, given the far-reaching nature of the changes he enabled, it might well be justified. He was certainly the most liberal and progressive Home Secretary in British history.

Books about the 1960s tend to divide between cosy pop culture nostalgia and serious social history. All Dressed Up is emphatically in the latter category; impressively comprehensive it puts the events and movements of the period in a longer historical perspective. Green writes with the instinctive sympathy of the insider - he wrote for the underground press in its later years - while never oblivious to the failings of the counter-culture: its rampant sexism, frequent intellectual incoherence and banality, and infantilising wish-fulfilment.

The counter-culture may have been over by the early ‘70s but the radicalism of the previous decade continued with the Gay Liberation movement, feminism and environmentalism. Green is surely correct that the most important and enduring legacy of the 1960s is greater personal liberty; the freedom to live your own life in your own way unconstrained by an externally imposed notion of morality. 21st century Britain, if more unequal, is certainly more liberal than it was in the 1960s. So much that was marginal or considered extreme then is now accepted and part of the legislature. Not that I mean to sound complacent; the right-wing backlash against the new freedoms began almost before the freedoms themselves and is currently being pursued with great vigour.

This history of the 1960s has a curious history of its own. It was published in August 1998 - a sequel to Days in the Life, Green’s excellent oral history of the ‘60s - and promptly withdrawn two weeks later as a result of two libel actions. A paperback edition, with the litigious section dutifully excised, followed a year later but this is also now out of print. It’s a pity as All Dressed Up is one of the most perceptive books I’ve ever read on this subject; happily, secondhand copies are still easily available at sensible prices. show less

Want rice and Aberdeens for dinner? Or andy mcnish--wouldn't that be apples and spice? It's rhyme time, and this witty, wildly inventive dictionary will inform you those "code words" stand for beans, fish, and nice. Amazingly detailed, it includes a history of rhyming slang, 100 categories, and over 2,500 phrases. Best of all, it takes a "bilingual" approach that lets you learn new slang while looking up the old!

Given Jonathon Green's status in the field – his three-volume Dictionary of Slang is far and away the definitive one in English – this overview is disappointing. It's perhaps a case of being too close to the trees to see the morning wood. He spends a lot of time talking vaguely about how slang should be defined (an entire chapter on the etymology of the word ‘slang’! Which is unknown!) and where it might be going, and not enough looking at specific examples in their social context.

A show more few of his characterisations puzzled me. He describes slang as uniformly ‘racist, homophobic, and, of course, both sexist and misogynistic’, a register whose ‘male, heterosexual gaze is unflinching’. Naturally slang includes much that can be described in these terms – but everything? Is there really anything racist or sexist in describing hair as a barnet, knocking back a bevvy, or calling something awesomesauce on Twitter?

It's particularly odd when so much slang nowadays is generated through social media, which is dominated by young women – and Green refers to this, but he seems to see it as a sort of exception that proves the rule, rather than a reason to expand the whole concept of what ‘slang’ represents. (The same could be said for the way he discusses black American slang in terms of slang's ‘natural’ racism, or Polari and other gay slang vs. homophobia.)

I also wonder if more might not have been said about grammatical issues. Slang is the one register of English that regularly uses infixes – as in absofuckinglutely – which, again, Green refers to in a throwaway comment but doesn't follow up on. He doesn't mention, for example, the crazy proliferation of grammatical uses for a word such as like, which can now be intensifying (I was, like, wasted) or approximating (It cost me like twenty quid) or introductory (Like, how are you?) or any number of other things. Hella is another interesting case study which doesn't get a look-in – and that would be fine, if other case studies were used instead. But in fact, very few real examples are adduced, which leaves Green's arguments rather floating in the ether.

He is on firmer ground when it comes to summarising the history of slang lexicography, as you might expect. But even here, it would also have been nice to consider, at least briefly, the role of slang in languages other than English. It may be that some of Green's characterisations of slang (for instance, that it is primarily urban) are true only in the Anglophone world, which would raise questions of its own.

If you just want a new way to think about slang for a day or two, then this makes for a very serviceable introduction and therefore, I suppose, does what it says on the tin. But to be honest, you're probably just as well off browsing through one of the author's actual dictionaries instead – which have the added bonus of presenting the flair, the fun, the shock and the inventiveness of their subject without the intermediary theorising. show less

Jonathon Green's 1996 book Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made is a wide-ranging and copious study of lexicographical pursuits from the Sumerian-Akkadian word lists of the second millenium BC through the contemporary period. It focuses almost exclusively on English-language sources after the sixteenth century or so (when the trend away from Latin began), but the author can hardly be faulted for this.

A scholarly treatment of the evolution of both the theory and show more practice of dictionary-making, Green's work is "not an academic history" (as he puts it in the preface) only in the sense that it is free of specialized philological jargon and readable by the lexicographical layman. It is not in any sense "popular history" in the sense that the term is currently used. Accessible, indeed, but hardly a breezy beach read.

Green leads the reader through the various stages of lexicographical development, and includes significant background on the debates which continue to occupy today's 'arbiters of language' - what words should be included? why, or why not? what is the lexicographer's proper role: documenter, or decider? Longstanding issues all, and none decided yet.

Chasing the Sun's most notable feature is its short biographical sketches of the great lexicographers of history, from those whose influence is quite forgotten today to those who at least many would recognize as having something to do with dictionaries (Johnson, Webster, Murray, e.g.). As I mentioned, the central focus for much of the work is England, but Green crosses the pond for two worthy chapters on American lexicography and the Webster-Worcester wars of the mid-19th century. Unfortunately (probably a function of some publisher-imposed page limit) Green's lengthy treatment of early efforts forces him to give short shrift to the OED, today's gold standard.

Of particular interest to Green is slang, to which he devotes two chapters here (practically if not particularly imaginatively named Slang I and Slang II), and which has been the subject of his other books. This was a good addition here; it complemented the rest of the work quite well.

Chasing the Sun concludes with Green's thoughts on the overall role of the lexicographer, which he sees as "to reflect the language, which in turn is a reflection of the culture in which it exists." He discourages censorship, noting "If the culture in part is racist, sexist, and in other was politically incorrect, then so too much the dictionaries be. The best they can offer is some parenthetical declaration that a given word or phrase, in a given defintion or usage, is so." And he points out that objective lexicography is oxymoronic; "to abandon all humanity, to achieve some Platonic perfection of an entirely disinterested dictionary is impossible."

A fine, deeply-considered work, and well worth the time it takes to read. Better and more useful footnotes would have been welcomed, but we'll take what we can get.

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