Offbeat English
If there’s a central narrative in the history of English dictionaries, it’s how the hard-word tradition of the 17th century expanded to cover the whole language in ever greater detail.
In practice, though, “the whole language” usually meant just the language of highly educated urbanites. Yet English is much more.
Another tradition, therefore, was born in the late 18th century—to document the language of the provinces, the underworlds, and the subcultures excluded from the centers of power. The surname of the lexicographer who begins this category is sheer coincidence.
THE FODGEL WIGHT
Francesco Bartolozzi, engraver. Portrait of Francis Grose. Drawn by Nathaniel Dance-Holland. Published Guy Fawkes Day 1787.
Francis Grose was a militia captain and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. His friend Robert Burns called him “a fine, fat, fodgel wight [plump creature] / O’ stature short, but genius bright.” He was the author of two pioneering dictionaries: one of provincial dialects, the other of slang and cant. Unlike most lexicographers, he supplemented his reading with actual fieldwork, roaming the British countryside and making “nocturnal sallies” into shady London neighborhoods to collect the living language.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 110
AND HIS VULGAR TONGUE
[Francis Grose]. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1785.
Grose’s concern was not the language as a whole but the “vulgar” (common) speech, including slang and “cant” (the jargon of thieves and beggars). Although all dictionaries involve some degree of plagiarism, it’s especially prominent in slang lexicography. Most of Grose’s entries are taken from B.E.’s New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (1699). But B.E.’s ghost had no grounds to complain, since many of his entries had been stolen from Richard Head’s Canting Vocabulary (1673).
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 110
GROSE GETS BIGGER
Francis Grose. A Glossary of Provincial and Local Words Used in England. Supplemented by Samuel Pegge. London: John Russell Smith, 1839.
Grose’s Provincial Glossary (1787) was one of the earliest attempts to document versions of the language spoken in England outside London, Oxbridge, and the Home Counties. In 1814, Samuel Pegge wrote a supplement that was then combined into Grose’s book 25 years later (the book shown here). The book is full of cricks and howds, dream-holes, littocks, reeken-creaks, and wattles.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 112
TRAINING FOR SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLARSHIP
James Orchard Halliwell. Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs, and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century. 2 vols. London: John Russell Smith, 1847.
James Orchard Halliwell produced one of his century’s most comprehensive guides to regional dialect. His pairing of “archaic” and “provincial” is important: many were convinced that traces of Old and Middle English survived in the living speech of the English provinces. To travel away from London was to travel back in time. Halliwell, under the name Halliwell-Phillipps, would become one of the Victorian era’s greatest Shakespeare scholars, making good use of his lexicographic experience.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 112
ARE YOU FLUSH IN THE FOB?
Albert Barrère and Charles G. Leland. A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant, embracing English, American, and Anglo-Indian slang, pidgin English, tinkers’ jargon and other irregular phraseology. 2 vols. London: Ballantyne Press, 1889–90.
The French writer Albert Marie Victor Barrère teamed up with a folklorist, Philadelphian Charles Godfrey Leland, to focus on the “irregular phraseology” of Britain and America, including, for the first time, words derived from Yiddish. The vocabulary can be charming, as with taradiddles (“falsehoods”), affygraphy (“said of anything that fits nicely”), flush in the fob (“well supplied with money”), muzzy (“drunk”), and the needful (“money”). Other entries, though, are less endearing, especially those from the late-Victorian demimonde.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 113
BIGAMOUS PORNOGRAPHER?
John S. Farmer. Americanisms—Old & New: A Dictionary of Words, Phrases and Colloquialisms Peculiar to the United States, British America, the West Indies, &c., &c. London: Thomas Poulter & Sons, 1889.
John Stephen Farmer—occultist, probable pornographer, possible bigamist—focused on “the divergence . . . between the Queen’s English and the English of the New World,” words like dime, ding!, and Dixie. His interest was words “employed by general and respectable usage in America in a way not sanctioned by the best standards of the English language,” supplemented by “the racy, pungent vernacular of Western life.” Americanisms was a warmup to Farmer’s seven-volume Slang and Its Analogues, compiled with journalist William Ernest Henley.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 114
LATINIZED LEWDNESS
Eric Partridge. A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. New York: Macmillan, 1937.
After a decade of “close observation of colloquial speech,” Eric Partridge issued the 20th century’s most popular slang dictionary, which went through many editions. In early editions he treated “unpleasant terms . . . aseptically”—meaning that English obscenities were often defined in Latin. The educated could read the naughty entries; everyone else was presumed unable to handle them. Even so, because of the coverage of “unspeakable” terms, the book was often kept on “restricted access” in libraries.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 116
THE ENEMY IS WHO?
Eric Partridge. Letter to Joseph T. Shipley. 7 July 1975.
ALS with Shipley’s notations.
While working on his Dictionary of Catchphrases, Partridge turned to informants for assistance, including amateur lexicographer Joseph Shipley. This list of queries from 1975 is typical. When Partridge tried to make sense of say uncle, Shipley responded: “late 19th children meaning ask for mercy / me to let up (e.g. twisting arm behind back, etc.).” Unfamiliar with Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Partridge asked about we have met the enemy—and they is us; Shipley curtly explained, “Am. comedian.” This letter is part of a trove of their correspondence.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 120
JIVE TALKIN’
Cab Calloway. The New Cab Calloway’s Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive. Privately printed, 1944.
Bandleader Cab Calloway integrated “jive” into his sets at Harlem’s legendary Cotton Club, one of the few places where white audiences could hear Black music in the 1930s. As “Professor Cab Calloway,” he facetiously lectured delighted audiences by explaining “Harlemese.” Sensing a marketing opportunity, his manager encouraged him to produce this tiny pamphlet defining about 150 jive terms. More jeu d’esprit than a triumph of lexicography, it holds an important place in history: it’s the first dictionary by an African American.
Ex coll. Jack Lynch. HHD no. 117
CUTE SUIT WITH THE WHAT?
Clarence Major. Dictionary of Afro-American Slang. New York: International Pubs., 1970.
Linguists began to take African American speech seriously in the early 20th century, but it took until 1970 to get a book-length dictionary. Poet and novelist Clarence Major took many words from jazz (offbeat). Some are joyous (hot dog!) and some playful (cute suit with the loop droop), but Major doesn’t shy away from “prison slang, the jargon arising out of the drug scene, prostitute and pimp parlance, the gambling and numbers racket lingo.”
Ex coll. Jack Lynch. HHD no. 118
THE QUEENS’ ENGLISH
Bruce Rodgers. The Queens’ Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972.
Publishing a candid “dictionary of homophile cant” in 1972 took courage. Just three years since the Stonewall uprising, homosexuality was still classed as “sexual deviation” and was illegal in 46 of the 50 states. But Bruce Rodgers was convinced that “gay slang, like black slang, enriches our language immeasurably.” This inexpensive paperback in brilliant lavender—the color associated with gay rights before the LGBTQ rainbow edged it out—was meant to reach a wide audience.
Ex coll. Jack Lynch. HHD no. 119
COMPUTING CANT . . . OR CAN IT?
Guy L. Steele, Raphael Finkel, Donald Woods, and Mark Crispin. “Computer Slang.” In CoEvolution Quarterly 29:26–35 (1981).
Computer enthusiasts have long constituted a subculture, but nobody thought to record their distinctive language until Raphael Finkel, a doctoral student, began collecting it in a text file nicknamed “The Jargon File.” As he shared it with friends over ARPANET, it bounced from lab to lab, growing and mutating. No early versions survive, but in 1981 CoEvolution Quarterly, a spinoff from The Whole Earth Catalog, published selections. A much-expanded version appeared in 1983 as The Hacker’s Dictionary.
Ex coll. Jack Lynch. HHD no. 121
"THIS IS A DICTIONARY FOR WOMEN"
Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler, with Ann Russo. A Feminist Dictionary. Boston: Pandora Press, 1985.
If A Feminist Dictionary doesn’t look much like other dictionaries, that’s because it’s an avowed polemic rather than a work of practical lexicography. Professors Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler produced what one archivist called “sort of a cross between the OED and the Whole Earth Catalog.” They use a dictionary format to get readers to question the ideology behind ostensibly neutral and objective reference books, which are “constructed almost entirely by men with male readers and users in mind.”
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 123
OF DRAGONFLIES, BEE-BUTCHERS, AND GALLINIPPERS
Frederic G. Cassidy & Joan Houston Hall, eds. A Dictionary of American Regional English. 6 vols. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985–2012.
Although British regionalisms were documented beginning in the Victorian era, America had to wait until the late 20th century. Frederic G. Cassidy, a Jamaican-born linguist, sent 500 lexicographic allies armed with questionnaires and tape recorders to interview more than 4,000 Americans across the United States. The focus wasn’t on slang but everyday things like dragonflies, children’s games, sudden rainstorms, and noisy eaters. The resulting six-volume Dictionary of American Regional English, or DARE, was a triumph of 20th-century American lexicography.
Ex coll. Karolyne & Bryan A. Garner. HHD no. 122
LIMITLESS LINGO
Jonathon Green. Green’s Dictionary of Slang. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Chambers, 2010.
The undisputed master of slang today is Jonathon Green, whose magnum opus, Green’s Dictionary of Slang, was 17 years in the making. It contains 110,000 headwords supported by 415,000 quotations spread out over 6,200 pages. It’s the fullest scholarly treatment of slang available. As in the OED, every entry is supported by documented quotations, with the earliest known citation for every sense. Green keeps it up to date in an online version, which is freely available.
Ex coll. Jack Lynch. HHD no. 126