Most entries include citations or references to sources, but a heavy price has been paid for their inclusion, even given the great increase in size. A bibliography rounds off the second volume. The typography is easily the best of any current slang dictionary and gives a clean and authoritative feel. It’s now in two large volumes (with, one has to regret, a whopping great price to match). Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor, respectively American and British, have taken on the job, in the process continuing an essentially amateur approach (in the best sense), since Mr Dalzell’s day job is as a lawyer and Mr Victor is an actor, broadcaster and writer.Īt first glance, the work is a substantial improvement. So anybody who takes on the task of revising his dictionary has the enormous and unenviable task of weeding out the master’s mistakes while updating it and maintaining the reputation of the brand. In later years, he wasn’t at ease with the slang of the post-war generations, for which he had poor cultural appreciation. He was much more a philologist, a lover of words, than a scholarly lexicographer and he was always prepared to step beyond the evidence to say something about a word, even if his comments bordered on guesswork. Not for him the cautious conservatism of the Oxford English Dictionary, with its mantra of “origin unknown”.
His work went through seven editions, plus an additional posthumous one edited by Paul Beale in 1984.īut his idiosyncratic approach has since been shown to have resulted at times in errors of dating and etymology based on extravagant extrapolation. Like some similarly placed predecessors, such as Johnson and Webster, he became an eponym. It is inconceivable to us today, when dictionaries are produced by teams of professionals supported by massive electronic archives, that his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English was created in 1937 as a solo effort. He spent most of his life working in that most intractable of lexicographical specialisms, slang.
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