Scholar who worked in slums of English

Press, 13 June 1979, Page 18

Scholar who worked in slums of English

By

ANTHONY BURGESS

in the ‘’Guardian,” London

Eric Partridge, who died last month at the age of 85, was still working at lexicography. I had a letter from him about a month ago lamenting the difficulty of getting any serious work done in a nursing home. Born in New Zealand and educated at Queensland and Oxford Universities, he fought with the Australians in the First World War and in the Second did not regard himself as too old to serve with the R.A.F. He devoted his life to the study of the mother tongue.

He was an old-fashioned philologist rather than a modem computerised linguist, and he followed the tradition of Dr Johnson in turning out highly idiosyncratic dictionaries, always most scholarly, but never lacking in the flavour of his own personality. His specialisation lay in what we may term the suburbs and slums of English:

soldiers’ slang, thieves’ cant, catchphrases. In 1930, with John Brophy, he compiled “Songs and Slang of the British Soldier,” moved out in 1933 to the more general world of “Slang Today and Yesterday,” and in 1937 produced his masterpiece. “A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.” The revision of that work into seven editions (the seventh, greatly enlarged, appeared in 1970) was a steady occupation which would have been a full-time one for a less energetic man, but he found time to bring out books on usage, cliches, etymology, comic alphabets (A for ’orses, B for mutton, etc.) and even a learned dissertation on the shaggy dog story.

His devotion to the English language sounded answering chords in others. He maintained a huge international correspondence with fellow philologists, amateur

and professional, and the final edition of the “Dictionary of Slang” is a record of friendship as well as a monument of lightly carried scholarship and ungrudged hard work.

It was a pleasure for many of us, who were proud to call ourselves his friends, to spend part of every day looking in newspapers and novels for fresh slang terms to feed the dictionary. Our contributions were always gratefully acknowledged in the body of the work, sometimes with a flourish of affection.

Best known as a slang expert, and even notorious for his lack of squeamishness in descending into the sewers of obscenity, in scholarly circles he was esteemed also as a considerable authority on literature. His first published work, in 1924, was a study of eighteenth-century romanticism. His contribution to the Andre Deutsch Language

Library was a richly annotated edition of Swift’s “Polite Conversations.”

“Shakespeare’s Bawdy” showed, for the first time, the variety of libidinous innuendoes the Bard attached to his own first name, and disclosed a wealth of erotic references in Shakespeare’s works which had previously, for the sake of Britain’s national poet’s moral reputation, been hushed up. Partridge, who loved life, found in the language of the unrespectable a symbology of sardonic vigour in the face of hardship, repression and tyranny. A great scholar, he was also a man of the people. The “Dictionary of Slang” glorifies demotic speech and reminds us that language is a product of continuous popular creation.

The work of recording it must go on, but there was only one person to do it. Eric Honeywood Partridge, the man with the most edible name, is going to be deeply missed.