Emma Byrne

Whores of phwoar: women talking dirty

Jonathon Green investigates the relationship between women and slang, from Moll Cutpurse to Mumsnet

Jonathon Green is a tosher. As a lexicographer he dives into archives and emerges with armfuls of slangy curios, such as ‘bell-polisher’ and ‘bitchin’. In Sounds & Furies he sifts English slang from tosheroons as diverse as the Wife of Bath to Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Green’s passion for his subject is infectious. His corpus of 110,000 slang words and phrases, published in 2010 as Green’s Dictionary of Slang, is filled with coinages both common and rare. In his latest volume, he’s set himself the challenge of unlocking women’s love-hate relationship with slang. As he says at the beginning, we know plenty about the status of women in slang, but not much about how women use it.

He offers plenty of examples of women coiners. Female reporters, online forums popular with young lesbians and even Mumsnet turn up some interesting nuggets. He has a great eye for lexicographical treasures he finds lying around. But reading suggests — and the index confirms — that men writing either about or as women (which Green refers to as ‘ventriloquising’) account for more than half of the slang in the book. Women’s actual words make up far less.

It’s in the seedy underbelly of erotica that the angry, dirty, funny side of women’s tongues finds freedom

When scouring the archives, women’s words are inevitably buried far deeper than men’s. It’s not that historical female characters are absent from the book. Mary Frith, the cross-dressing thief and pimp known as Moll Cutpurse, takes up a good 25 pages. But her supposed words never come from her directly. Instead, they are the product of a dozen different male writers from the 17th to the 20th centuries. From the playwrights Middleton and Dekker to the sociologist John McMullen we see only what men thought of Mary’s deeds, and how men thought she must have spoken.

And there’s the rub: Green has set himself an unenviable task.

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