Three Specialized Slang and Jargon Dictionaries

328Reviews do with matters erotic. This dictionary will be a joy to scholars of the theatre as well as to those who have only wondered for years of movie-credit reading what a best boy is and have never explored beyond their suspicion that it refers in no way whatever to anyone's well-behaved son. Peter Bauland The University of Michigan * * * Three Specialized Slang and Jargon Dictionaries Many slang and jargon dictionaries are, to varying degrees, rehashes of material that has already appeared in dictionary form. In most such books, previously published material is mixed with the compiler's own collection of terms. These specialized dictionaries are usually the products of individual authors who differ considerably in the degree to which they acknowledge their primary sources. None of these works is or claims to be complete or authoritative, and each of them will serve as input to future specialized dictionaries. Often the sole value of such works is to provide the first printed attestations of otherwise unprinted terms. Occasionally such collections clarify terms found in previous works, and, of course, they introduce new errors and misspellings of the old terms. Three such specialized dictionaries are reviewed briefly below. A list of references for all three follows the third review. A Dictionary of Drug Abuse Terms and Terminology. Abel, Ernest L. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1984. xi + 187 pp. $29.95. The word list of this dictionary includes drug slang, trade and chemical names for abused drugs, names of commissions and agencies concerned with drug abuse, and a smattering of alcohol, tobacco, and general crime-and-punishment terms. The book is attractively put together and contains about 3100 entry words. Both alcohol and tobacco, which are usually Reviews329 considered abused and addictive, are covered only incidentally. This omission, according to the book's preface, is due to the fact that there are so many such terms that it would be arbitrary to include some and exclude others. The same might be said, however, for every class of words in the book, especially the trade names and chemical names for drugs, which seem to be represented sporadically. Similarly, many terms that can be found in the works listed in Abel's bibliography are not to be found as entries in his book. At the back of the book there is a glossary of fourteen pages that lists groups of words for various drug topics. The first line of this section states: "Most of the terms listed in the glossary can be found in the dictionary." One wonders why some of the terms in the glossary made it to the dictionary and some did not, especially if the author is trying to avoid being arbitrary. The final three pages contain a seventy-two item bibliography, which lists dictionaries, glossaries, and other works on drugs and drug use. This book is unlike Abel's A Marihuana Dictionary (1982) in that there is no attempt to date the material or the specific sources for each entry. There is little cross-referencing and usually no attempt to explain the imagery or history of an entry. It is like the earlier dictionary in that it uses the spelling marihuana throughout. In fact, this work includes most of the terms found in Abel's earlier work on marijuana. Although the book was not meant to be limited to drug slang, the slang terms are the most interesting and also most likely to be the terms that are the most useful. Among the entries there are many terms that seem to be part of standard English and have no unique place in drug abuse terminology, e.g. (starting in the D's), delusion, efficacy, emetic, felony, fermentation, forensic medicine, generic name, happening, hedonistic, hepatitis, hydrocarbons, illusion, etc. Other entries recall the names of agencies and events in drug regulation history, e.g. (starting in the O's), Opium Protocol of 1953, Oregon Decriminalization Bill, Panama Canal Zone Military Inquiry, President Johnson's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration, President Kennedy's Ad Hoc Panel on Drug Abuse, Prettyman Commission, etc. 330Reviews On the good side, Abel has included new terms concerning the use of freebase (cocaine), amyl nitrite, and...