This erudite study of slang coined by women ends up being a wild goose chase, discovers Lewis Jones Jonathon Green is justly hailed as the King of Slang. His magnum opus, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, includes some 110,000 words and phrases, treated according to the OED’s “historical principles”, with each definition illustrated by quotation. An ardent and indefatigable philologist, he has produced many other books, among them The Stories of Slang, Slang Down the Ages and the uncompromisingly titled The Big Book of Filth. “Slang for me,” he writes in his latest, “is first and foremost a counter-language, a term that deliberately mimics the ‘counter-culture’ of the 1960s.” This is unsurprising, since Green started out in the “underground” press of Sixties London, and has published three oral histories of that decade....