Before we look at your book selection, could you tell us what slang is?

Slang is difficult because everything about it defies simple classification. Nobody knows the etymology of the word slang. If you take slang to a linguist they try to define it within the boundaries of what they know as linguists, and very soon they discover they can’t find a specific register into which it falls.

I see slang as the counter-language. At its heart it’s down, it’s dirty, it’s grubby, it’s tart, it’s essentially subversive. It questions and deals with themes like sex, drugs, violence, rudeness, abuse, racism and so on and so forth. Slang is primarily concrete, but the one abstract that underpins it is that of doubt. It seems to me that slang is always doubting. It’s always questioning, it’s always cynical, it’s always undermining and it’s always been negative. It’s very thematic, which means it’s basically a lexicon of synonyms. There are 1,500 synonyms for having sex, 1,000 penises, 1,000 vaginas and 2,000 drunkards and drink-related words… and so on.

I see slang as Freud would see the Id. In other words, the unrestrained side of ourselves. Slang is the pleasure principle. It evokes it in language, lets us get it out there. It has no morals, it has no party, it has no religion, it’s just in it for the kicks. What I love most about it is that it is ourselves at our most human – not at our best, but at our most real. There’s a nice line in Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds about someone moving from conventional speech to rough, truthful language. That’s what I think slang is – rough, truthful language.

You started your professional life writing for the underground press, and then books on the counterculture in the 1960s. How did you end up specialising in slang?

I had always enjoyed looking at slang dictionaries and books that had slang in them. In 1981, when my first slang dictionary was commissioned, I saw that not only did this subject interest me but that there was also a gap in the market. The great slang lexicographer Eric Partridge had died a couple of years earlier. In 1937 he had written the hugely influential Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English and that had gone through a number of editions. But when Partridge talked about English, he meant English English and not American. By the late 1970s, when it was still being published, it was absurd that it did not include any American slang. Partridge also just didn’t get the 20th century. He certainly didn’t get teenagers, drugs and the counterculture. I thought: I know about that stuff, I’m younger, I shall have a try.

What is your working life like as a slang lexicographer? What are the tools of your trade?

The tools of my trade are the books that sit on my shelves and those that I research elsewhere. There are the many works of my predecessors, who started off in 1530. I have books on slang from Britain, I have shelves of Australia-related slang as well as American stuff and black American slang. It is impossible to be a lexicographer without a degree of plagiarism. However, to steal from one book is plagiarism; to steal from many – and I steal from many – is research. But I don’t see it as stealing. The point is that language is not fresh and new, and this is as true for the Oxford English Dictionary or for Dr Johnson as it is for me. Language does not pop up all shiny and new each time a lexicographer signs a contract to write a dictionary. You have to make sure you include everything that has come before you.