ENGLISH *SLANG
THIS iS an age of English Dictionaries; and it wbuld appear that saturation point is not yet reached. The last few years have seen the completion of the great Oxford Dictionary, and the appear- ance of a reduced form of this in two volumes—the: Shorter Oxford Dictionary, a Supplement to the great work, in which the new matter is treated with the same thoroughness of definition and illustration as was the material in the original work. In addition there has been a new edition of the large Webster, and other dictionaries on a smaller scale have also appeared.
Now comes Mr. Partridge with a book of a different character indeed from any of these, but, in its own way, not unworthy to rank with the best of them in plan and performance. Mr. Partridge has already a considerable collection of notable books to his credit, both on slang and on more general aspects of English words. His latest contribution is a solid work, excellently planned and arranged, which will not soon be superseded. Mr. Partridge attempts to trace the source and origin of each word or special usage, he indicates the approximate period during which each came into currency and survived in use, and the social milieu in which it had its life and being. Whenever possible, and this is surprisingly often, reference is made to printed sources, ancient or recent, in which a word or expression is found.
We have in the Preface a brief classification of the material included in the Dictionary into slang and cant : colloquialisms, solecisms and catachreses, catch-phrases, nicknames, vulgarisms. According to the author's rough estimate, the two first classes include respectively 44 per cent. and 42 per cent. of the words and phrases given ; the last class is said to form only -I per cent. Something must be said, in -passing, of what Mr. Partridge, rather euphemistically as some will consider, terms vulgarisms. He understands by this " words and phrases that, in no sense slangy, are avoided in polite society." Of these " unpleasant terms " his rule has been, as he tells us, to include them all ; " in a few instances I had to force myself to overcome an instinctive repugnance." In a work such as this Dictionary, it is doubtless right that these words and phrases should be recorded, since they form at least a considerable, if not, let us hope, the most important, element in the vocabulary of certain social strata, which this book, together with much else, sets out to display.
There is, in many instances, a very narrow dividing-line between words and expressions which may properly be classified as " slang " and others which are merely " colloquial," and I am not sure that the reasons for the allotment of a particular word to this or that category in this Dictionary are always perfectly clear. We must remember, however, that words and phrases have their ups and downs, they lose caste or gain promotion ; they may pass from being slang terms to good, received colloquial usage, and may even rise to a permanent place in elevated and dignified style. Much slang is of very transitory duration ;, produced in special circumstances, and used chiefly by a particular class, it dies away as these pass out of common remembrance, or as that ceases to be prominent
The Great War gave birth to many words and phrases which, used at first by soldiers on active service, spread by a natural process to their friends and families at home, and were for a time widely current. But the post-War generation hardly know these words, or, if they just recognise them, certainly make no use of them. The serviceable napoo has gone, - so has •sem fairy ann. American talkies and crime stories have brought us acquaintance with a host of terms•used,- or supposed to be used, by the gangster and the gunman. These have for the moment a precarious, and probably only a transitory, life on the fringes of conversation. They live, if it can be called a speech life, among the shadowy scoundrels and the seductive adventuresses of the American detective story and the screen. It seems likely that within a generation or so most of these words and phrases will be as much forgotten as will many of those who introduced them to British ears— the stern-eyed heroes, and the wide-eyed beringleted ladies whose toothy, mirthless smiles delight their admirers in the pages of the illustrated papers.
To pass -to turns of phrase -less special than the above, -we- 'find that many colloquialisms' well established formerly have faded away and yielded place to others. Turn for a moment to the language of polite hyperbole. Awfully {good, nice, 13tc.) held its ground for more than...half a century at least, to express varying degrees of approval, satisfaction and the like. Quite recently, or so it appears, to me, awfully has been displaced in the speech of the rising generation by terribly. In the eighteenth century the same - feeling was expressed by vastly, monstrous, extreme (e.g., extreme handsome, &c.). It is a characteristic of fashionable colloquialisms at all periods that words are so emptied of their meaning as tc express little or nothing. This is true of the familiar use in the early eighteenth century and later, of filthy, nauseous, plaguey and of the quite recent devastating. Thus filthy fellow. nauseous toad, and so on, were often terms of mild endearment. and devastating often means no more than " troublesome," " tedious." Many old contractions, once popular, have dis- appeared from our living, current speech today, such pozz., cit., bamb'd ; even demirep is dead or obsolescent.
A perusal of Mr. Partridge's Dictionary is instructive as well as amusing. Every page contains something which arrests attention. Such a work as this exhibits all the pro- cesses at work in living language. In slang speech life is seen in its intensest form. Here, if anywhere, we " catch the manners living as they rise." The highly figurative character of vocabulary—so often completely buried in well- established, conventional usage—is displayed so as to be recognisable ; the almost infinite possibilities of generalisa- tion and specialisation of meaning may here be watched as active processes ; the rise and passing away of idiomatic usage, for ever going on in all language, is often observable in the slang of a single age. A word, in conclusion, concerning that rather large element, already referred to, classified as Vulgarisms and Low Vulgarisms. Certain things, commonly taboo by the reticence of polite society, are spoken of freely. in other_ circles where less restrained utterance prevails. These things are either named tout .4 trac, as Brantome says, or thinly disguised in euphemisms which are frequently even more suggestive and " low." The " lowness " of these phrases consists in their very ingenuity, in their scarcely veiled facetiousness and levity. But it is vain to deny the picturesque- ness and vividness of many of these scabrous idioms. What is shocking in these " euphemisms " is the cynicism and the unpleasant attitude of mind to certain facts of human life, which they too often embody. A highly developed though perverted metaphorical sense has frequently given an indecent twist to the most innocent word or phrase. It must be admitted that much of this popular metaphor is essentially poetical, yet over it a kind of salacious leer seems perpetually
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