The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang [antikvár]

'Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.' Carl SandburgAlongside Standard English, the ostensibly 'pure' language of formal speech and writing, of Times leaders and BBC erudition, stand several sub-species of language, less beloved of Eng. Lit. teachers, but none the less popular and possibly even more vigorous and entertaining for that very exclusion. These include cant: the language of the underworld; yaz-gon: the special or occupational language and the 'professional slang' of a variety of interest groups; colloquialism: informal, conversational speech, used, as it were, through the dinner but not for the after-dinner speechifying; solecisms: the variety of linguistic irregularities; dialects: regional usages, ever more besieged by television's bland mid-atlanticisms; and finally slang.Definitions of slang abound. Aside from Carl Sandburg's description above, one can choose from all of these. The Oxford English Dictionary (1933) talks of 'either new words, or current words employed in some special state'. Fowler (1926) has 'the playing with words and renaming things or actions'. H. L. Mencken (1936) offers 'the exuberance of mental activity and the natural delight of language making'. More recently the Reader's Digest Success with Words (1983) claims, 'slang seems to stand between the general words - the standard and informal ones available to everyone - and the in-group words available to specific segments of the population'. Finally, the doyen of every slang lexicographer, Eric Partridge, who opined in Slang: Yesterday & Today (1933) 'Slang, being the quintessence of colloquial speech, is determined by convenience and fancy rather than by scientific laws, philosophical ideals and absolutes, and grammatical rules in short, it is catholic, tolerant, human and, though often tartly, humane. Inherent in human nature as a psychological tendency and potentiality, slang is indicative not only of man's earthiness but of his indomitable spirit; it sets him in his proper place: relates a man to his fellows, to his world and the world, and to the universe.' Or, in the words of Dr J. Y. P. Grieg, writing in the Edinburgh Despatch in 1938, 'the commonest stimuli of slang are sex, money and intoxicating liquor'.When, in 1937, Eric Partridge published the first volume of his monumental Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, synthesizing