Slang Down the Ages

Book excerpt: Coined in the spontaneity of the everyday spoken act, slang exists as a testament to human nature's inventive and subversive instinct. This history of English slang documents our verbal predilections for the racier side of life, at the expense of the more quotidian, let alone respectable - it is no coincidence that the longest chapters in this book concern sex, money, drink and drugs. Slang Down the Ages tackles its subject theme by theme, taking standard English words and phrases and tracing the ingenuity of their slang equivalents over time. In each case approximating 'earliest use'. Be amused by the playfulness of our linguistic heritage, intrigued by our need for encrypted signs and appalied by some of the more bold-faced puns, as Jonathon Green charts five centuries of our developing and ever-diversifying vocabulary.