The idea of a Slang dictionary is in many ways counterintuitive — or, one might say, a bit bonkers. Slang by nature is cool, and dictionaries are uncool. Slang subverts authority; dictionaries exist to be authoritative. Dictionaries take decades to compile, while slang terms come in and out of fashion faster than you can say etymology. But the strange marriage of academia and irreverence is what makes Jonathon Green’s monster work, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, so fun to flip through. It provides the same surreal, anachronistic delight one might have gotten from hearing Freud lecture on Charlie Sheen’s recent verbal diarrhea . Green’s three-volume work, priced at $450, is the product of 17 years of collecting and editing. With roughly 110,000 words and phrases
