Meanwhile, "long" in the sense of boring or unpleasant seems to have been missed altogether. Such a mammoth work must inevitably contain slips: I doubt that "geeky", in a quoted newspaper article's description of "a geeky guy with silly facial hair", was intended to mean "unattractive" exactly and Green has "bare" in modern yoofspeak meaning "many, lots of", though it can also mean simply "very" (I overheard a girl last week admitting sweetly: "My mum's bare nice to me"). And consider the nuanced spectrum of "get" phrases including get off, get off with, get off on, tell someone where to get off, get her!, get you!, get down with your bad self, and, of course, get fucked (the last to be pronounced while giving someone the hairy eyeball). One marvels too at the variety of usages to which a single word has been put: a "growler" has been a dog, a four-wheeled cab, a whisky-flask, a toilet, the vagina and food.
It can be faintly disheartening to come across yet another word bigging up the penis as a weapon of violence (there are 1,000 of them, Green says), but there are also many obscure beauties: exflunct ("to destroy or overwhelm"), taradiddler ("a petty liar"), or the splendid puddlejumper ("an excitable person"). The great themes here are sex, death, religion, alcohol and intense dislike of other people, which is to say the great themes of all literature. Slang, Green argues in his introduction, is a language "of marginality and rebellion, of dispossession and frustration". The boys who admired my "hard" jacket on the Tube the other week were probably no more aware than I was that this usage to mean "excellent" or "fashionable" dates from at least 1936. It is surprising to learn how old some current slang is: you could keep someone posted in 1864, and "put up or shut up!" goes back at least to 1873 gambling dens.
Like the OED, it is built on "historical principles", with dates for citations, impressing upon us the boisterous demotic creativity of our forebears, who were no less interested than we are in making up new ways to describe getting drunk (1650: "go to the scriveners and learn to make indentures"). A fter more than a decade's labour, Jonathon Green, lexicographer of the subversive, has produced as fine a three-volume dictionary of slang as you would desire to piss upon (1700: phrase meaning "excellent, first-rate").
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