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RR 2015/216 The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2nd edition) Edited by Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor Routledge London and New York 2015 xvi + 864 pp. ISBN 978 0 415 52720 0 (print); ISBN 978 1 315 75477 2 (e-book) £49.99 $79.95 (print)
Keywords Dictionaries, English language, Slang
Review DOI 10.1108/RR-04-2015-0077
Of various names forever associated with particular reference books, Eric Partridge (1894-1979) is among the most prominent for his dictionaries of English slang terms and words. His work began prior to the Second World War and among the dictionaries sitting on a shelf above my left shoulder there is a copy of his 1945 A Dictionary of R.A.F. Slang, complete with his usual lively introduction. While there had been previous dictionaries and compilations of "unconventional English", his comprehensive and scholarly approach over many decades established his pre-eminence in the field, emphasised by eight editions between 1937 and 1984 of his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.
Time, and especially contemporary slang, moves on, and unless the lexicographer moves along with it, he or she is overtaken by linguistic events. The compilers of the New Partridge believe that by about 1960, Partridge had indeed been overtaken by his subject, not least among difficulties encountered in his exclusion of American slang which by then had become pervasive in the UK. They also believe that in failing to assimilate the cultural changes which followed the Second World War, he eventually found himself baffled by the contemporary slang of...