Joanna borrows Dame Isadora’s mantle to explore slang

Lately, I’ve been editing a work in progress, checking slang.

It was a manuscript that I thought I’d finished, ready for submission. Then a couple of my writing friends read it and suggested some changes. Sadly for me and my workload 🙁 most of their suggestions were bang on.

And one of the queries was about the informal language my characters used. Was it appropriate for their age, their background, their culture? Can slang make a character aged 25 sound more like one of 45?

Good question. And the answer is…?

px-media – stock.adobe.com

As so often, it depends. It depends what your period happens to be. Is there a definitive answer?

In a slang dictionary, maybe?
Yes, they exist. Definitive? Well…

Is anything ever definitive where language development is concerned?

If you go for the printed word, you might be offered the Grose Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue from 1785.

Later, the standard work became Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Historical Slang (originally published in 1937, followed by many revised editions).

I have paperback copies of both Grose and Partridge which I used regularly to check references for my historical fiction.

But my current wip is contemporary, or nearly so. I needed something more up-to-date.

Jonathon Green’s comprehensive three-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang (from 2010) is hard to find and very expensive—currently £349 at Waterstones—so I bought his single-volume version, without all the quotations.

It’s very helpful.
It tells me when terms began to be used.
And also, importantly, when usage died out.

But it was published in 2005 and it doesn’t cover slang developments in the 20 years since then.

And we all know how fast the spoken language can develop.

Maybe the internet has the answer?

If you ask a search engine about slang, you’ll be offered a raft of online dictionaries.
But can you rely on them? And do they agree with each other anyway?

Let’s try some examples.

Example 1: antsy

At one point in my plot, character A (male, older) notes that character B (much younger, and female) is “antsy” in the sense of “twitchy, jumpy”. Have I got the meaning right? Is it appropriate for the period of my novel (2010-2020)?

More good questions. And the answers?

Some online sources:

1. The online slang dictionary gives the meaning as “jumpy”. It’s dated 2004-2010.
2. The peevish slang dictionary gives the meaning as “nervous, agitated, restless”. No dates.
3. Slang.org has no entry for “antsy” even though it bills itself as “the ultimate internet slang dictionary”.
4. Merriam-Webster gives 2 apparently distinct meanings: (a) restless, fidgety (antsy children), impatient, eager (antsy for a new challenge); (b) nervous, apprehensive (antsy investors). Interesting that the same word should mean both “eager” and “apprehensive”. No dates.
5. Slangdefine.org gives 3 meanings: (a) reckless, fidgety, impatient sometimes anxious or nervous; (b) edgy, horny, restless; (c) completely retarded and an unbelievable nerd. No dates. Horny? Really? Not sure about meaning (c) either. But this site bills itself as “the largest dictionary of English slang” so it may know things I don’t.
6. The online version of Green’s Dictionary of Slang gives a single meaning: “twitchy, nervous”. And it provides dated quotations. The most recent context for the use of “antsy” seems to be 2018.

From which I conclude?

nuthawut – stock.adobe.com

I think I’ve got enough evidence there to use “antsy” in the meaning of “twitchy, nervous” in the period when my novel is set.

And although the earliest usage quoted by Green (6) is 1945, the word seems to have been current until pretty much the present day. Character A is of an age to use it. And character B would almost certainly understand it. Phew.

I’m now glad I bought Green’s Dictionary of Slang even though it is 20-odd years behind the times. It makes me reasonably confident that his online and more up-to-date version is to be relied on.
In so far as one ever can.
Green himself says: “Slang research is always changing what we know and there is only one rule: words are always older than you think.”

“Antsy” is certainly older than I had thought. I was surprised to read a quotation from 1945.

Example 2: pins

Character A (the older male) admits to being a leg man. He appreciates what he refers to as “a nice pair of pins” on a female in a short skirt or tight jeans.

Would the younger female, character B, use that term? More important, would she understand it?

I thought “pins”, in the sense of “legs”, was a 20th century coinage. Totally wrong. Green traces it back to the 16th century. But he also has quotations from the 21st century including, I’m glad to see, “nice pins” from more than one source.

So I think it’s probably fair to assume my younger female, B, would understand the allusion. On the other hand, I’m not at all sure it’s an expression she would use herself. She might well think it objectified the owner of said pins. I’m older than B, but I agree. It’s not a word I would use.

By the way, I noticed that Merriam-Webster (4 above) doesn’t have “pins” in the sense of “legs”. When I searched for “pins” I got “persons in need of supervision”. Yeah, right.

Example 3: floozie (or floozy)

prostock-studio – stock.adobe.com

Character C (a 50+ provincial French housekeeper) refers to various dubious minor female characters as “floozies”. My author friends queried that slang and doubted anyone would use it these days.

Actually, Green online has quotations from 1902 to 2024. But almost all the recent references to “floozie” or “floozy” are American. The most recent UK one dates from 1999.
So possibly we were both right?

On the other hand, Character C is of an age when she might use such a word, disparagingly, because she so disapproves of the kind of women her employer brought into the house. They weren’t prostitutes but they were what used to be called “good-time girls”, I think. (That phrase has only one quotation from Green online, dating from 2013. Much more recent than I expected. US slang had “good-time Jane”, from 1940s-1960s.) If I’d been writing about women from a previous century, I’d probably has used “lightskirts” but that definitely won’t do in a contemporary.

My rather straight-laced housekeeper wouldn’t use “good-time girls”. It’s not nasty enough. She’s sticking to the more insulting “floozies”.

Example 4: bang on

At the beginning of this blog, I said that my friends’ comments were “bang on”. And it’s in my wip, used by the older male character, A.
Where does that come from?
Is it current? Or am I out-of-date?

“Bang on” is RAF slang from WWII. It means “exactly right” and it was derived from “bang on the target”. Of bombs, of course. According to Green, the phrase is still in use though I think it’s debatable whether today’s young people would use it. Still, Green has a quotation from 2023 to prove it’s current. And I think my older male character would use it. So I’m sticking with that one.

Author put out to grass?

On balance, I think it’s OK to use examples 1-4 in my wip, provided I put them into the mouths of characters who are older. So maybe it’s not quite time yet to put me out to grass? That one, sadly, has no 21st century quotes and probably wouldn’t sit well in my contemporary story. (Actually, I didn’t use it in the wip. Honest.)

Does any of this really matter?

That’s something readers will decide, I’d say. But if my younger female, character B, talks about things being “bang on”, younger readers might well fail to believe in her.

If that pulled them out of my story, I’d have failed, wouldn’t I?

One solution is to find a different and more appropriate slang expression to use. That’s where my trusty Slang Thesaurus comes in very handy. Or I could use a beta-reader of the right age and background.

Another solution might be to avoid slang altogether. But would that encourage my readers to believe in female B? Would today’s young women completely fail to use slang? Personally, I doubt that.

So my conclusion is that, as authors, we ought to try to get slang right—for the period, for the character, for the milieu. But maybe you disagree?

PS: On the joys of research into slang

Sarah was blogging about research rabbit holes last week. And you’ll see from all the above that I have also been in the warren business. I found some of it utterly fascinating and, for other word-lovers out there, I can certainly recommend Jonathon Green’s online slang dictionary.

Look, for example, at some of his timelines (on a separate site). They show how words came into use over decades and centuries. I loved this timeline for “larceny”. My first screenshot shows the period from mid-18th to mid-19th century.

In this second screenshot, I’ve homed in on words meaning “to rob, to steal” by using the drop-down menu. That made it much easier to pick out the words I was interested in.And to prove it can be up-to-date, here’s the timeline for “rob, steal” going into the 21st century. Loads and loads of words. Have to say that I recognised less than half of them. “Doowop”, anyone? “Pra-pra”?  “Hork”?

Many thanks to Jonathon Green for providing these very useful tools. Don’t know about you, but I’m much more confident, now, that I might have a reasonable chance of getting my slang right, even in a (relatively) contemporary story. And I’m not out to grass quite yet…

Joanna