In Defence of Eric Partridge

Fallen yet not without Might

[The basis of what follows is my review of a selection of the slang lexicographer Eric Partridge’s major works (Routledge Revivals: Selected Works by Eric Partridge 1933-68) that had just been reisssued and newly bound by his publisher Routledge in 2015. I have, as ever, topped, tailed and tweaked it somewhat for this substack.]

I received, albeit indirectly, a comment on a term in GDoS the other day. The term in question was shamus, primarily a policeman, and my corespondent included an essay in which the writer, a linguist rather than lexicographer, was at pains to point out that the word did not, as popular (not to mention widely accepted) etymology has it, come from the Irish name Seamus (James) via the clichéd identification of an Irish ancestry with New York City’s earliest generations of policemen. This was an easy connection to make, slang offers a range of ‘Irish’ coppers: doolan, gallagher and shean (the latter being neither Mick nor Paddy, but Jewish Al Shean, the Marx Brothers’ maternal uncle), the jerry, muldoon, Murphy, O’Malley, Paddy, and toby. Those stand, but shamus, whether as policeman or private dick, does not. As the writer pointed out, the origins lie in Hebrew and Yiddish shames/sham(m)os, a synagogue official.

The citations I have found for GDoS leave no doubt. The bulk acknowledge the Semitic origin. Only one, Irwin’s Dictionary of American Tramp and Underworld Slang (1931) opts for Irish roots, stating ‘Sham.–A policeman, probably from the fact the majority of these men were from Ireland, and wearers of the shamrock.’

In this new assessment of the etymology, the author finds a scapegoat: Eric Partridge, who in time would become the 20^th century’s leading expert in the slang lexis, and my predecessor in its collection. His fame came and remained attached to his much-revised Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, first published in 1937.  This, however, eschewed American slang, and shamus, in his definition and a vote cast for the Irish origin, comes in his Dictionary of the Underworld (1949). Seventy-five years on, he is duly savaged, and not for the first time. I have, I admit, done it myself, the more one knows the less, it appears, did my precedessor, but unlike crueller (or more honest) analysts, I remain fond. Without Partridge, whose death opened the door to my own faltering steps as a slang lexicographer, my professional life would have been much different. It is a life that I have appreciated and I remain indebted.

Writing in Slang To-day and Yesterday (1933), his pioneering, if inevitably sketchy history of the lexical subset that would become his life’s work, Eric Partridge, pondered the etymology of the word ‘slang’. It was, he confessed, a ‘prize-problem word’. Eighty-seven years on, and forty-five since the death at 85 of the  man whose many fans would nickname him ‘The Word King’, it is hard to avoid feeling that in terms of his work and the reputation it brought him, it was Partridge too who represents a ‘prize problem.’

Like his near contemporary, former OED editor Robert Burchfield, Partridge was born in New Zealand, and alongside many fellow-countrymen first experienced Europe in the trenches of the First World War. It was here he met London’s cockneys and their often slangy language, and it was that language that would fascinate him and inform his professional life. Lexicography did not come first. After the war he taught, then attempted publishing with his Scholartis (‘scholars and artists’) Press but the firm foundered in the Depression.

Fortunately two of its titles – Partridge’s own  edition of Francis Grose’s  Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), and Godfrey Irwin’s American Tramp & Underworld Slang (1931) came to the notice of the reference publisher Routledge. They in turn had the rights to the last great slang dictionary: Farmer & Henley’s seven-volume Slang and Its Analogues (1890-1904). They turned it over to Partridge, requesting an update. Slang Yesterday and To-day may be seen as his first tentative essay at learning his subject; its fruit was the substantial Dictionary of Slang & Unconventional English (DSUE) which appeared in 1937; a further seven revisions would follow. In a 40-year career Partridge wrote widely, notably the Dictionary of the Underworld (1949, 1968) and many smaller works, all word- or language-related, a sample of which are reissued here. He was, as his nickname attests, the ‘go-to’ authority for all forms of non-standard English. In 2005, under new editors, a full-scale revision of DSUE would incorporate the one thing Partridge had omitted; American slang, although this two-volume work was backstopped at 1945.

The Word King

Retrospect has not been invariably kind. His methods have been criticised as dated (the current critique brands him as a disdained example of a despicable genre, the ‘gentleman lexicographer’), his lexicography as lacking rigour. As to his etymologies…The co-editor of the revised DSUE, Tom Dalzell, has suggested that despite his popular reputation as an unrivalled expositor of slang, from a dictionary-making perspective Partridge’s real value was not in the work itself, but simply that he persisted in slang collection. Is that fair?

In a brutal dissection of Partridge’s work, published in 1951 under the title ‘The cant of lexicography’ the folklorist Gershon Legman, himself no mean eccentric and almost invariably pitted against mainstream scholarship, eviscerated the British slang-gatherer. Partridge, he suggested, was little more than the collator of other (and the inference was better) men’s work. Worse, he was a plagiarist or, equally reprehensible, one who failed to acknowledge many of his sources. Legman also trashed – accurately on the whole – a selection of Partridge’s etymologies in the Underworld lexicon.

It is hard to deny Legman. Partridge’s dictionaries are overly skewed towards the gathering of his predecessors’ work. But this is not plagiarism, merely practicality. Legman was no lexicographer: only in some fantasy world in which the language might be virginally reborn ready for each new dictionary, can the lexicographer not incorporate his or her predecessors. (A situation that has been much improved by the Internet where one can truffle amongst boundless newspaper databases and much more. But older dictionaries still provide the questions that send us off in search of answers). The problem of etymologies is less excusable. Partridge may, as Anthony Burgess put it, have been the truest of  philologists, quite literally a ‘lover’ of words, but his attempts at scholarly philology too often  eschewed all necessary displine. Cheerfully refusing to admit linguistics into his lexicography, he always wants to make some kind of statement. For him something was always better than nothing – even if that something might err towards guesswork. Reading Legman’s accurate refutations is to squirm.

Partridge also missed a vital trick: he refused to acknowledge the growing influence of America. This was just about feasible in 1937; it was a gross error after World War II. Nor, it is apparent, did the ageing Partridge ‘get’ youth with its cults, its music, its rebellion and soon its drugs. As for sex, and the many words it generated in slang, he was open in his distaste for such excess.

Slang, of course, is always a teenager, while the lexicographer grows ever-older. Partridge was always happiest in the past. No sin. But for the dictionary’s reader it is often the latest slang that counts. If that is missing or misconstrued, as it increasingly was as edition followed edition of the DSUE, the lexicon is reduced in value. 

Thus his faults. And yet he enjoyed undeniable fame. First, perhaps, because of his absolute humanity. It may have led him to absurdity – such as his inclusion of an entry for miniskirt, and his embarrassing definition thereof  –  and on occasion to a level of casual racism that can only be excused by his age, but in an era when teams and corporatism were becoming the norm in dictionary-making, Partridge was always out there alone. Such is the slang lexicographer’s tradition: the craft attracts solo artistes. His was also an endlessly alluring language. His voluminous correspondence underlined how fascinated people were with his work.

He was, in the end, too much of a ‘gentleman scholar’ for modernity. Too keen on savouring dusty pages, ever more blinded by the flash of the new. That too comes from the solo path. He grew old, slang stayed forever young and by the end, as part of the endless game of Pacman that is dictionary-making, the new lexicon inevitably ‘swallowing’ its predecessor,  it was time for something and someone new.

Yet his work remains of profound importance. In the long run, as Tom Dalzell has suggested, the work itself – like all lexicography – may be flawed, but what matters is that he did it, and in so doing perpetuated slang lexicography. The author of the DSUE may lack, as Randolph Quirk has pointed out, ‘the magisterial scholarship, meticulous authentication and consistency of presentation’ that make the OED so monumental a work, but without Partridge there could never have been the same level of modern slang lexicography. The OED cites him more than 770 times.

To sum up Partridge and in so doing to offer a tribute to the many lexicographers who preceded him and worked, like him, very much on their own, one can do worse than borrow from the detective writer Raymond Chandler, one of Partridge's many correspondents. Describing his own efforts in a letter of 1957, Chandler suggested that 'To accept a mediocre form and make something like literature out of it is in itself rather an accomplishment.' In the hierarchy of language, slang is that 'mediocre form'; what Partridge did was make, if not literature, then something profoundly literate out of his spurned lexicon.

I find no shame in following his footseps. Indeed, I can only hope that someone, perhaps as contemptuous of my work as others have been of his, is lining up to see me off.

But not yet. Not. Fucking. Yet.

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