Green doesn't tell you all that much about his life (' some confessions' is right). To be a lexicographer, he writes, is to be a drudge (as per Dr Johnson) but also (since you define and prescribe) a 'tinpot deity'. He writes repeatedly of himself that he is a 'voyeur', and of his 'cowardice'. It gives a solitary, bookish only child – sensitive to his outsiderdom as a Jew in the English public-school system – a means of retreating from the world, of controlling it, of engaging with its vulgar pleasures at a safe remove.

Sometimes a penis is just a penis.'ĭoes this benign monomania make him happy? The impression you get reading Odd Job Man is slightly different: that, rather, it makes him less unhappy. I allow for detail as it is necessary to be precise: sometimes it is a large penis, sometimes a small one, sometimes flaccid, sometimes erect. 'I have written the two words 'the penis' 1,351 times (from 'Aaron's rod' to 'zubrick') 'the vagina' 1,180 ('abc' to 'zum-zum') and 'sexual intercourse', by which I mean the heterosexual variety, 1,740 ('action' to 'zot'). His subject is narrow in scope but deep in synonymy. After its publication, he writes, 'I wept'. The results of his labour are three slang dictionaries (62,00 pages, 110,000 headwords, 415,000 citations) – of which his Summa Theologica, 17 years in the making, is Green's Dictionary of Slang (2010). Of 'relaxing', of the 'day off'. I find no joy in the list of popular gap-fillers – popular culture, hobbies, travel.

When I didn't live in terror of the abyss of inactivity. When, to render it in as simple a way as possible, I didn't work or aim to work 24/7/365. 'I can no longer remember when life and work were still easily distinguishable.

He has spent 30 years doing more or less nothing but. He is the world's foremost slang lexicographer. J onathon Green, as per the title of his not-quite-memoir, has a very odd job indeed.

Days in the Life by Jonathon Green