Five Hundred Years of the Language of Crime

Crooked Talk

Britain's expert on slang looks at the language of crime

Pretty much anybody would like this book... Excellent on every aspect of crime.

A comprehensive and entertaining guide to the language of law-breaking

As gripping as any novel ... I'd recommend it to anyone who uses language or is interested in his fellow human-beings

Jonathon Green is a writer and broadcaster and the nation's expert on slang. His Dictionary of Slang first appeared in 1998 to huge critical acclaim, and Green's Dictionary of Slang, his definitive three-volume work, was published in autumn 2010. He has written widely on slang and dictionary-making, notably Slang Down the Ages and Chasing the Sun, a history of lexicography. He has also chronicled the world of the 1960s in two oral histories: Days in the Life and All Dressed Up. He lives in London and Paris.

The language of crime has a long and venerable history - in fact, the first collection of words specifically used by criminals, Hye-Way to the Spittel House, dates from as early as 1531. Jonathon Green is our national expert on slang, and in Crooked Talk he looks at five hundred years of crooks and conmen - from the hedge-creepers and counterfeit cranks of the sixteenth century to the blaggers and burners of the twenty-first - as well as the swag, the hideouts, the getaway vehicles and the 'tools of the trade'. Not to mention a substantial detour into the world of prisons that faced those unlucky enough to be caught by the boys in blue. 
 
If you have ever wondered when the police were first referred to as pigs, why prison guards became known as redraws, or what precisely the subtle art of dipology involves, then this book has all the answers.

Cutting It Fine

The restaurant business from the inside - the only book that tells it how it really is.

Tells you everything you want to know about what goes on in the kitchen... Parkinson is a professional to his scarred fingertips, and impressively honest

Packed with good information, with plenty of enlightening detail about what it's really like to work in a London kitchen. Anyone who works at the coalface of the capital's restaurant scene should buy this book. It will tell you more than Kitchen Confidential ever could about the realities of kitchen work

This detailed account painstakingly punctures the idea of cheffing as a glamorous profession. The hard, repetitive work is conveyed in all its tedium - and adrenalin-fuelled excitement

An English equivalent of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential

A warts-and-all account of the real world beyond the kitchen door

Andrew Parkinson was head chef at Soho Soho in London and is now executive head chef at Jamie Oliver's Fifteen restaurant, London. 
 
Jonathon Green's many books include Days in the Life, All Dressed Up and The Cassell Dictionary of Slang.

How do you cost a menu? 
 
What happens if everyone orders the sea bass? 
 
What happens if no one orders the sea bass? 
 
How do you deal with a complaint about food poisoning? 
 
How indeed can five people in a small hot kitchen produce great food for hundreds of people at twenty minutes' notice? 
 
Leading chef Andrew Parkinson answers all the questions we have ever pondered, and reveals in telling detail each bit of the everyday magic involved in running a successful restaurant.

Days In The Life

Vastly entertaining, highly illuminating and not a little moving. . . Days in the Life is undoubtedly the best available summary of its period and milieu, and will probably remain so for quite some time to come.

This is the first publication I've seen on the 1960s to address all closely the question: how did it feel in that dawn to be alive?

An action packed tapestry of illuminating flashbacks

Jonathon Green is one of the world’s leading lexicographers of English-language slang. His most recent dictionaries are Green’s Dictionary of Slang (3 vols, 2010) and the Chambers Slang Dictionary (2008). Among other slang-related titles he has also written The Slang Thesaurus, Slang Down the Ages: The Historical Development of Slang and Crooked Talk: The Language of Underworld. His history of lexicography – Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made – was published by Jonathan Cape in 1996. 
 
During the ‘hippie era’ that forms the background for Days in the Life he worked on various ‘underground newspapers’, notably Rolling Stone, Friends, Oz, IT and Time Out. He has also written oral histories focussed on immigration (Them, 1990) and sex (It, 1993). The Sound of the Streets: a History of Slang is due for publication in 2014 and he is currently working on a memoir of 30 years of slang lexicography: Odd Job Man, to be published by Jonathan Cape.

Jonothan Green offers a time trip from lat-fifties CND, beatniks and bop to the threshold of our own decade's designer revolutionaries and style warriors. . . His chosen form is the oral history pioneered by Studs Terkel in which cross-cut voices recount a shared experience or epoch. . . what anecdotes!'Guardian. Green has collected 101 quintessential sixties groovers and lovingly teased out their memories, all of them refreshingly self-critical and remarkably sharpened by hindsight. 'Glasgow Herald. `This is the first publication I've seen on the 1960s to address all closely the question: how did it feel in that dawn to be alive?. . . An action packed tapestry of illuminating flashbacks. 'Spectator.

Jonathon Green

In his relentless campaign to drag slang out of the sewer and brothel, and into the drawing-room and academy, Green has no rival. He is the Dr Johnson of slang, its Putin, its Mr Toad, its Dickens.

[Green's] kaleidoscopic memoir charting three decades exploring our mother tongue's more exotic margins is vigorous, gonzoid, learned and entertaining.

This memoir of a life spent exploring the grubby margins of the English language reveals plenty about both that language and Green himself.

Some Confessions of a Slang Lexicographer

For thirty years Jonathon Green has been collecting slang – the indefinable language of the gutter, the brothel, the jail, the barroom – producing a succession of dictionaries, most recently the three-volume Green's Dictionary of Slang, that have been recognised as the most comprehensive and authoritative ever compiled. In this fascinating memoir Green reveals that he first began collecting slang in the 1970s, noticing that the contemporary authorities (notably Eric Partridge) preferred the past to the present, unaware of the huge array of new slang being coined by the counter-culture. He ponders why he still does this strange, lonely job, exploring the satisfaction that can be gained by tracking down the first use of a term just encountered in one of the cheap dime novels he devours for research. The lexis leans towards pimping and prostitution, crime and imprisonment, violence and cruelty, drunken and drugged debauches: what does this say about the man who spends every day truffling for it? 
 
A fascinating look at how one man has built a lexis of 125,000 words that includes 1,740 words for sexual intercourse, 1,351 for the penis, 540 for defecation/urination, 247 for fat, 219 for vomiting and 180 for anal sex, Odd Job Man will delight all those who love the words that the conventional dictionaries leave out.

Jonathon Green

Praise for Odd Job Man

In his relentless campaign to drag slang out of the sewer and brothel, and into the drawing-room and academy, Green has no rival. He is the Dr Johnson of slang, its Putin, its Mr Toad, its Dickens.

[Green's] kaleidoscopic memoir charting three decades exploring our mother tongue's more exotic margins is vigorous, gonzoid, learned and entertaining.

This memoir of a life spent exploring the grubby margins of the English language reveals plenty about both that language and Green himself.

In his relentless campaign to drag slang out of the sewer and brothel, and into the drawing-room and academy, Green has no rival. He is the Dr Johnson of slang, its Putin, its Mr Toad, its Dickens.

[Green's] kaleidoscopic memoir charting three decades exploring our mother tongue's more exotic margins is vigorous, gonzoid, learned and entertaining.

This memoir of a life spent exploring the grubby margins of the English language reveals plenty about both that language and Green himself.

In his relentless campaign to drag slang out of the sewer and brothel, and into the drawing-room and academy, Green has no rival. He is the Dr Johnson of slang, its Putin, its Mr Toad, its Dickens.

[Green's] kaleidoscopic memoir charting three decades exploring our mother tongue's more exotic margins is vigorous, gonzoid, learned and entertaining.

This memoir of a life spent exploring the grubby margins of the English language reveals plenty about both that language and Green himself.

Books by Jonathon Green

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