Cassell's Dictionary of Slang [antikvár]

Introduction to the Second Edition Cassell's Dictionary of Slang was published In late 1998; it offered some 74,500 entries, covering worldwide anglophone slang from the early 16th century to the late 20th. The last seven years have moved the world into a new century, and this second edition, adding 13,000 headwords, as well as a number of new definitions for those terms already included, reflects slang's onward expansion. The great themes: sex and the bodily parts with which we pursue it, money, drink, drugs, criminality, insults and the like, are unchanged, but slang's underlying need for originality, even for secrecy - however shortlived such secrecy may be in this media-sawy, trend-conscious world -remains. The terms mutate, develop, re-emerge in a newborn form, the older ones are subsumed in the fresh creations. Thus has it been for a half a millennium of slang's collection, thus it will undoubtedly continue. This second edition is not, however, a simple expansion of its predecessor. It is hugely and significantly Informed by my work in progress, a multi-volume work 'on historical principles', in other words, a dictionary that offers 'citations' or usage examples. Research for that work has covered thousands of books, plays, journals, newspapers, magazines, TV and movie scripts, comics, rock, blues and rap lyrics and much more. In addition to which the ever-expanding archives, typically of old newspapers, that are coming online have made all forms of lexicographical research a matter not so much of painstakingly ferreting out the material, but of finding time to look into the wealth of potential sources that is now available. That is an on-going task. (To this end, I have decided to omit the ever-expanding bibliography from this edition, since the sources which it would list are more useful in the context of citations.) The main knock-on effect for this single-volume work has been in what I hope is substantially improved dating. Dating without citations is always hard; without as best possible a certified 'earliest use' one tends to fall back on one's predecessors: for instance, is it in dictionary A? then it dates to approximately year X, if it is not in dictionary B, appearing 50 years later, then it has become obsolete in the interim between publications. If it is, then one looks on to dictionary C, yet more decades down the line. Citations change that radically and offer much improvement. In many cases what we have read has pushed back our knowledge of when a given slang word or phrase entered the language, but in others we have found that supposedly 'dead' words are in fact thriving. The constraints of a non-cited dictionary mean that entries must still be given relatively 'broadbrush' dates, e.g. [mid-17C-early 19C] or [20C+], but those who compare the two editions will see that many of these have been changed. That our researches are on-going means that even the improvements are not invariably 'the last word' - a hitherto unknown citation can mean a new predating - but I hope they represent a substantial step in the right chronological direction. Similarly the geographical labels, e.g. {Aus.) or (US), have been changed when, as is often the case, it transpires that a term has been less limited in use than had hitherto appeared. Finally, the reading for citations has shown that many existing terms have been used in ways that I had missed or which had yet to be coined when I put together the original 1998 edition. I have included these extra definitions, some of which may be quite old, others very new, at the relevant headword. While I doubt that many of the dictionary's users will have the desire to check 1998 against 2005,1 can assure them that this edition, while no more finite than any dictionary can ever be, is as up-to-date and accurate a collection of terms as is possible. Jonathan Green august 2005