Jonathon Green is an English lexicographer of slang and writer on the history of alternative cultures. Jonathon Green is often referred to as the English-speaking world's leading lexicographer of slang, and has even been described as "the most acclaimed British lexicographer since Johnson".
Life and career
Of Jewish origin, Green was educated at Bedford School and Brasenose College, Oxford where he read history. An author, freelance journalist, broadcaster and lecturer, Green's primary activity is the collection and analysis of slang. To this end, he has amassed a database, which – according to Green – holds around 135,000 slang words and phrases, underpinned by c. 650,000 citations. It covers English-language slang since the 16th century and offers the vocabularies of the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the anglophone Caribbean. This database provides a resource for all his slang-related publications. For Green, slang is as much a part of the greater English language as any other of its sub-sets such as dialect or technicalities. But unlike those, it opts for an actively oppositional role. With a conscious acknowledgement of the counterculture of the 1960s he has termed slang the 'counter-language' and more recently 'the language that says "no"'. Born at the margins it has remained there, even if the secrecy that lay at the heart of older slang cannot resist the information flow of the modern world. The sixties counterculture was the subject of his first oral history, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961–1971, for which he "interviewed more than 100 of 'the main players', got 500,000 words on tape, a 400,000-word manuscript"; the book emerged around half this length. The study All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture was the source of litigation, from both former Beatle George Harrison and artist Caroline Coon, and was withdrawn for 12 months. In June 2000, Coon received damages of £40,000, plus £33,000 costs, from publisher Random House, for the false claims Green had made.
Authority on slang
The single-volume Chambers Slang Dictionary was first published in 1998; a second edition appeared in October 2008. Green's most substantial work in this field is Green's Dictionary of Slang: a three volume slang work which traces, via examples and citations drawn from the last five centuries, the history of the slang vocabulary from the earliest use of every term. It includes slang from across the English-speaking world. It was published in the UK in late November 2010 and in the US in March 2011. An e-book version has been released as part of the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf collection. Green's Dictionary of Slang was awarded the 2012 Dartmouth Medal – an annual award from the Reference and User Services Association recognizing the most outstanding reference work of the year. A website version of Green's Dictionary of Slang was publicly launched in October 2016, and is updated quarterly. His most recent publications are Sounds and Furies: The Love-Hate Relationship between Women and Slang, Language! 500 Years of the Vulgar Tongue and Odd Job Man: Some Confessions of a Slang Lexicographer. Green lives in London, England and Paris, France.
