A dictionary of slang and unconventional english [antikvár]

The greatest and, I hope, the most helpful change effected in this new edition of /l Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is the conflation of the originál text of the first (1937) edition with all the subsequent Addenda that became, by 1961, so numerous as to warrant a second volume over half the size of the originál. Besides making the Dictionary easier to consult and to browse in, this reunification has made it possible to correct a number of small inconsistencies, blind entries, duplications and one or two downright contradictions, all of which had gradually and almost inevitably crept in during the thirty busy years of Eric Partridge's piecemeal work of updating between 1937 and when the 7th edition went to the printer. The second major change is the incorporation of the material accumulated by E.P. between 1967 and his last suggestion for a new entry, a mere six weeks before his death at the age of eighty-five on 1 June 1979. His notes, which he gave to me in autumn 1978, comprised somé 5,000 entries: many entirely new; somé additions, modifications and corrections to existing entries; a few back-datings. Nearly 1,000 of these were my own contributions, made during the course of a regular and copious correspondence that began in early 1974 when I was nearing the end of twenty-one years with the Intelligence Corps. These 1,000 may be considered to have been 'vetted' and approved; post-1978 'P.B.' entries and citations, unless otherwise attributed, are my own responsibility. An Appendix has now been added to contain items too unwieldy to fit comfortably into the main body of the text; it includes, for example, a chart showing the evolution of the signallers' phonetic alphabet that has given rise to many slang terms (O Pip, Charlie Oboe, etc.); somé self-contained bodies of slang, e.g. that of prisoners of war in WW2; terms used in Housey/Tombola/Bingo and Tiddlywinks; a short discourse on the nonsense-prefix harry; and so on. Other changes are less obvious, because they are omissions. E.P. included a considerable number of 'solecisms and catachreses', in other words illiteracies, or phrases couched in a grammar inconsistent with that of Standard English, and malapropisms. Many of these he treated more authoritatively and at greater length in his later Usage and Abusage, and the enquirer may seek them there, as those interested in the long-dead solecisms many from the time when Modern English was still experimentál, may look in the OED for the oddities and dead-end offshoots that E.P. dug out from its columns. I have omitted all such unless I know them to be or to have been used deliberately for (usually) humorous effect. Alsó disregarded are most of the familiar ehsions of the aren't, weren't, sort, and phonetic renderings of what is merely slovenly (or perhaps dialect) ix