Postscript

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You would think that a lexicographer and ety- mologist who has devo- ted as large a slice of his lifetime as Eric Partridge has to soldiers' songs,

Shakespeare's bawdy, 'unconventional English' and the language of the underworld would be pretty uninhibited by now about spelling out in full the more direct four-letter words in a scholarly dictionary of slang. So I suppose he is, and it must be one or other or all of his publishers, Mr. Routledge, Mr. Kegan and Mr. Paul (whatever happened, I won- der, to Mr. Trench and Mr. Trubner?) who have obliged him, in the new, two-volume edition of his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional Eng- lish (Routledge, 5 gns. the set), to spell the old four-letter words with asterisks; and although one of the simple excretory monosyllables, with its single consonant, is spelled out in full, the other is quite arbitrarily, as far as I can see, prin- ted three times in full and eighteen times with an asterisk on the same page. Observe how taboos turn even scholarship arsy-varsy (see p. 18, though the Shorter Oxford—p. 101—prefers arsy- versy).

* More even than most big dictionaries, this is one of those maddeningly delightful works that won't leave you alone to verify your references (or 'quotations'—see p. 1668, reference 4, in Stevenson's Book of Quotations. which is another of them) and get back to your desk : there is so much to look up, and,everything leads to some- thing else. For instance, how long acclimatised in Britain, do you think, is the expression 'OK?'

And how much more recent is the phrase 'the OK thing to do'? Pirtridge quotes the Great Vance, idol of the music-hall in the 1870s, as singing: The Stilton, sir, the cheese. the OK thing to do On Sunday afternoon, is to toddle to the Zoo.

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The walking to the Zoo— Walking to the Zoo—

The OK thing on Sunday is the walking to the Zoo.

Not that there isn't plenty to argue about, to dis- pute, and flatly to contradict—there isn't, for in- stance, still a Leinster Regiment, as Mr. Partridge says there is on page 323, in his note on the Ger- man Legion, and there hasn't been for the better part of forty years: the United Service Club is referred to as 'The Senior,' tout court, but isn't the Senior Services Club; and I can't believe that 'bolo' (p. 1007) derives from 'bow-legged' rather than from Bolshevik, like 'bolshie,' which is more or less what it means..

But more than this, much more, can be for- given to the scholar who has enlightened me at last as to what it is that causes the word 'shower' ('the reference is indubitably defecatory,' is Mr. Partridge's splendid phrase) to be greeted in the theatre with the same sort of Rabelaisian snigger that is aroused by any reference to a brass mon- key. And to the lexicographer who records for posterity that 'the smaller-print, brief reviews at back of The Times Literary Supplement' are known in what he calls the world of books as 'The Paupers' Grave.'

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I see that my fellow-liberals and Jews- by-descent-though-not-by-religion (as well as Liberals-with-a-capital and Jews-proper) are getting steamed up again about anti-Semitic dis- crimination in clubs. let them clear their minds, not of cant, for they are far from being humbugs, but of muddled thinking. I detest discrimination, but I also detest interference with peOple's private liberties, and a club is a private place. (I am not discussing municipally provided golf clubs and tennis courts, which are only nominally 'clubs.') Surely the members of a club are entitled to de- cide for themselves whom they wish to play golf with or have a drink with in their leisure hours?

In any case, I don't believe that what discrimin- ation does exist is truly racial (any of the clubs concerned would jump at the chance of electing 1 Lord Rosebery, even though his mother was a Rothschild), or religious (they would elect Lord Rothschild himself, though he is a practising Jew). It is a purely low-grade snobbish dis- crimination, of which I am sure there are Gentile victims, too, and seems to obtain only in such suburban golf clubs and seaside lawn-tennis clubs as I can't imagine a gentleman, Jew or Gentile. ever wanting to join, anyway.

Peter Dominic's sixth wine-tasting is under way at his cellars in Orange Street, off the Hay- market (though you write for particulars to Hor- sham, Sussex), and goes on for the next two Wed- nesdays and Thursdays. Alsace and the Tyrol provide the wines—just the thing for this sort of weather, for most of them have the fruitiness without fullness that is characteristic of German and Austrian wines (Alsace has been German, after all, and the South Tyrol Austrian—both regions grow the same types of vine as the Rhine does, and name their wines after them).

I notice that the price of tickets has gone up from 15s. to a pound, so that framboise d'Alsace can be included to round off the buffet meal, framboise being the dearest of all liqueurs. No wonder, for it is distilled, brandy-fashion (it is a colourless eau-de-vie. not a sweetened and flav- oured liqueur), from wild raspberries. and it takes

don't know how many hundredweight to pro- duce a bottle. It is half as string again as whisky; dry and yet seeming to hold the very essence of raspberries, with colour and sweetness dismissed. as it were, as irrelevancies, and costs 67s. (Id. at Dominic's (I think there are dearer ones). To my taste, it is absolutely delicious, though I shouldn't care to drink it, even if I could afford it, more than now and again, such as when other people were paying. A glass at the Dominic tastings represents quite a hit of one's pound back.

CYRIL RAY