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In April 2014 a tweet appeared I had no idea of the poster, I could not resist the content: ‘Do you want to put the dictionary online?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered. Like many writers looking for exposure, I had signed up for Twitter. It is fitting, therefore, that the net would save me. How could I give up when every day my own database expanded and thus, I hoped, improved?
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If my predecessors had sometimes struggled to find examples of slang in use, my problem was no more than one of choice: where should I go today? Newspaper databases and contemporary journalism, TV and movie scripts, lyrics from every type of popular music, social media… I even read more books, often from newly formed digital archives.
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The Internet was a cornucopia of material. This was not noble or otherwise plucked from the self-help manuals: what else was there to do? I research slang much as I breathe. Backed by my wife, who in a second career has made herself a peerless mistress of cite extraction, I continued to work. The wedding dress grew stained, tattered, the wedding feast crumbled to dust. I envisaged a secretary bringing a restorative drink. The concept of patronage, of simply backing something worthwhile, cut no ice. My host cut invariably to the chase: what’s in it for me? The word ‘monetize’ reared up. The experience was, let’s say, educative.
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Our first conversation ended ‘We look forward to working together.’ The last, nine months on, admitted ‘We don’t actually know how to do this.’ I know few business people. I wrote to universities, some seemed amenable. Like Dickens’ Miss Havisham I kept the wedding dress. We had danced, ever more intimately, almost to the altar. I had already had a long flirtation with the most important of all such companies as a possible backer of the print book. Reference publishing in the UK was vastly reduced. A publisher, an academic institution, a commercial business. OK: the slang lexicographer is traditionally a soloist. Two years on there was a second meeting: do you intend to support my continuing work? Absolutely not. The author Martin Amis, in a footnote, had christened me ‘Mr Slang’. The book appeared, was kindly reviewed, won a prize, even achieved a reprint. If I still wanted to take the dictionary online, it was up to me. It was this, then, that the new owners rejected. The then publishers may have seen something different but we did not discuss it. I saw an all-singing, all-dancing, ‘live’ edition of the dictionary. The term meant no more than a digital version.
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Its definition was somewhat vague today’s e-book had yet to take off. In 1998, when I signed the contract for Green’s Dictionary of Slang (GDoS) as an expansion (there would be citations and doubtless many more entries) to my Cassell Dictionary of Slang, the Internet was up and running. We will publish, they continued, but despite your contract, we will not produce the on-line edition that had been part of that contract. But their bosses had placed a gun at their head, and they in turn placed one at mine. The twin gods of profit and loss were unhappy. The new imprint had no experience of this variety of reference, the book – many pages, lengthy editing, the complex typography that informs any dictionary – would be expensive. I had fantasies of meetings in some distant office: ‘No, not that bloody slang dictionary again…’ Ironically, the new uber-company, a global name, had already thrown me out once, before finding themselves in charge once more, thanks to a takeover. The commissioning publisher no longer existed, that which followed had announced, at around year twelve ‘well, we’ll publish it if we have to’, and a successor had been consigned to the scrapheap a few months before. Those same 17 years had seen a vast change in their industry. ‘We do not,’ announced my new publisher at our first meeting, ‘want to do this book.’ This is not, as one nears the end of seventeen years of research on a project that has not simply taken over one’s life but pretty much come to represent it, what one wishes to hear. The road to Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online We’re very happy to present this guest post by Jonathan Green, the Green behind Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which launches today online!