Tom Dalzell & Terry Victor: The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang & Unconventional English.(Shorter notices)(Book review)

Tom Dalzell & Terry Victor The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang & Unconventional English. Routledge, 2400 pages, $175

Once "oiks" (n. a disagreeable youth, U.K., 1925) have overrun completely the civilized world, we ladies and gentlemen won't be able to make out a word they're saying. As Theodore Dalrymple noted, writing on A Clockwork Orange in the Winter 2006 City Journal, there's a crystal-clear reason for that:

 
   [Burgess] marks the separateness of his novel's 
   young protagonists from their elders by their 
   adoption of a new argot.... Vital for groups 
   antagonistic toward the dominant society 
   around them, such argots allow them to identify 
   communicate with insiders and exclude 
   outsiders. Although I worked in a 
   prison for fourteen years ... I never came to 
   understand the language that prisoners used. 

We now possess, like a Berlitz guide to the language of the End Times, a marvelous new two-volume dictionary of "slang and unconventional English." In their preface, the editors tell us that "Eric Partridge made a deep and enduring contribution to the study and understanding of slang" with his "eight editions of The Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English published between 1937 and 1984." The editors' mission is simple: "Just as Partridge did for the sixteenth-century beggars and rakes, for ...