The Concise New Partridge Edition of Slang and Unconventional English ed. by Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor (review)

Eric Partridge wrote enough and was successful enough to become a recognizable, and thus valuable, brand. He was certainly the best-known and most prolific slang lexicographer of his day. So it is hardly surprising to see his name exploited by Routledge—his longtime and ever-faithful publisher—in what was dubbed The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (NP) when it was first published in two volumes in 2006. This “new” work was ostensibly built upon the foundations of Partridge’s original slang dictionary that began life in 1937 with more than 40,000 entries and was expanded over six decades until, in DSUE8 (1984), it encompassed some 57,000 headwords, under the editorship of Paul Beale. The heft of the “New Partridge,” edited by Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor, derives in large part from its generous use of citations—in fact, “hundreds of thousands of citations from popular literature, newspapers, magazines, movies, and songs illustrating usage of the headwords” (Preface). Since such an ambitiously expansive work comes with a high price tag ($335/£210 for the second, slightly expanded, edition of 2012), Routledge soon issued what purports to be a slim-line sibling in one volume, The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2007)—henceforth CNP. The second edition (2015) of this “concise” version (CNP2) is the subject of this critique.

The editors are surprisingly frank about the well-documented shortcomings of Partridge’s dictionary efforts—those “features of his work that have drawn criticism over the years”: quirky alphabetizing, problematic dating, “etymologies that strayed from the plausible to the fanciful,” subjective classification by register (slang, cant, coarse, vulgar, etc.), and the effective exclusion of American slang. That they were not blinded by Partridge’s reputation is reassuring and at least speaks to pitfalls they have avoided in all versions of their dictionary—they wisely avoid any classification by register, for example. But, given their succinct summary of his defects, it is a stretch to see them as “proud heirs of Partridge” who are “work[ing] hard to continue the Partridge tradition, observing high standards of lexicography ….” In truth, the editors appear to be uncomfortably burdened with a name they cannot disclaim in light of the Routledge investment in the man and the product.

At 864 pages, the dictionary is hardly concise (OED definition: “expressed in few words; brief and comprehensive in statement”); perhaps “Shorter”—as in The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary—would have been more a more accurate label. The editors—or perhaps the publisher—determined to retain the full complement of some 60,000 headwords and thus the path to concision required eliminating many of the “hundreds of thousands of citations”—albeit at what is arguably a significant cost to the value of the dictionary. After all, the three criteria for inclusion in CNP and CNP2 listed in the preface are 1) slang and unconventional English, 2) used anywhere in the English-speaking world, 3) after 1945. So words in circulation well before 1945 need the kind of evidential support that will both validate their inclusion and suggest their distributional and temporal range. Without the citations, these goals cannot be fully met. Consider, for example, the short entries for larrup and larruping. In NP, the entries read:

larrup verbto beat, to thrash, to hit vigorously UK, 1823He’s just larruped a shot from distance which beat the keeperbut not the post—into the side netting

—The Guardian, 26 February 2003

larruping nouna thrashing UK, 1889From LARRUP (to beat).“It would have done them good if they had had a good‘larruping’,” the judge [Lord Chief Justice Goddard] surmised

—The Guardian, 22 May 2002

But in CNP(2), the entries have been pared down so that there is no evidence at all of contemporary usage:

larrup...