A pair of Partridges

Abstract

Tom Dalzell, with Terry Victor, The new Partridge dictionary of slang. London: Routledge, 2005. 2 volumes. Pp. xvii + 2189. ISBN 9780415212588/0415212588.

The renegade subset of the English language that is defined as ‘slang’ is, to pun quite unashamedly on both slang and its standard cousin, a ‘bastard’, a term that here stretches its usual definition as ‘illegitimate’ to mean, as the OED has it, ‘having the appearance of, somewhat resembling; an inferior or less proper kind of; … things resembling, but not identical with, the species which legitimately bear the name’. Like standard English it is a language, variously, if inaccurately, synonymized as an argot, a cant, and a jargon, but it is undeniably a rougher-edged variety of that language. A bastard in both registers. It deals, unsurprisingly, with the rougher edges of life. As the essayist J. Y. P. Greig put it in 1938, the content of slang concentrates on ‘sex, money and intoxicating liquor’, and if one adds the vocabulary of ‘recreational’ drugs (which after all are no more than an alternative form of intoxication, albeit one that has drawn the short straw of illegality) there is no reason to feel that anything has changed. Nor had it done in the five centuries of slang-gathering that preceded Greig's analysis. A broad-brush taxonomy of the slang lexis covers crime (notably murder, nonterminal violence, robbery, confidence trickery, and prostitution, as well as the whole world of punishment, especially as regards police and prisons, wherein a whole new subset of language has been coined); intoxication (especially the state of drunkenness); insults whether personal, national, religious or racial; sexuality (including parts of the body and the uses to which they are put, plus of course defecation and allied bodily functions). It is unreservedly sexist: there are few positive words for women, and those only in terms of their sexuality. The word ‘mother’ is most commonly found combined with ‘fucker’, the oedipal polysyllable. There are few abstracts, no philosophizing other than the occasional cynical aphorism. Of caring, sharing, and compassion, as slang itself might have it: ‘sweet fuck all’. It is a rude, brutal vocabulary which revels in its lack of correctness, political or otherwise (it is as orthographically unruly as it is socially: the most ‘spoken’ of all vocabularies, its spelling defies regulation, and who is to say how centuries-old terms were in fact pronounced?); it is, to its credit, honest in its declarations: the word's most likely etymology lies in various Scandinavian terms meaning ‘throw’; to extend the image, it is a language that is wholly ‘in your face’. Yet it is not without wit, nor is the prevalent coarseness there merely for its own sake. It has a purpose. Of humanity most human it reflects our innate tendency to say ‘no’, to run counter to what has been established. If there is a standard, then we evolve an opposition, a contrary, counter-form; if the standard is linguistic, then slang is a counter-language.