Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: Colloquialisms, and Catch-Phrases, Solecisms and Catachresis, Nicknames, and Vulgarisms

Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: Colloquialisms, and Catch-Phrases, Solecisms and Catachresis, Nicknames, and Vulgarisms

Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: Colloquialisms, and Catch-Phrases, Solecisms and Catachresis, Nicknames, and VulgarismsAuthor: Eric PartridgeTitle: Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: Colloquialisms, and Catch-Phrases, Solecisms and Catachresis, Nicknames, and VulgarismsPublication: Macmillan General ReferenceEdition: FIRST THUSDescription: 8th Edition, First Printing. Published by Macmillan, 1984. Quarto. Hardcover. Red topstain. Book is very good. Dust jacket is very good with light shelf/edgewear. Great copy of this useful reference title. 100% positive feedback. 30 day money back guarantee. NEXT DAY SHIPPING! Excellent customer service. Please email with any questions. All books packed carefully and ship with free delivery confirmation/tracking. All books come with free bookmarks. Ships from Sag Harbor, New York.Seller ID: 356638Subject: Reference We Buy Books! Collections - Libraries - Estates - Individual Titles. Message us if you have books to sell! Wordslinger Eric Partridge intended his dictionary to be a "humble companion" to the Oxford English Dictionary --a ribald companion is more like it! In Partridge's domain, a gentleman's pleasure-garden has little to do with the horticultural, referring as it does to the genitalia muliebria . On the other hand, play pussy is a Royal Air Force term meaning "to take advantage of cloud cover," and since the 1970s British forces have called intelligence operatives secret squirrels . And so it goes. There is enough slang, cant ("i.e., language of the underworld"), and expletives here for all takers--there's low, Cockney rhyming, "picturesque Australian similes," society phrases, and even the semiproverbial. Dorothy Wordsworth, of all people, used a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse --a phrase "applied to a covert yet comprehensible hint, though often stupidity is implied." Partridge also reveals low language's less larky side. His book can be a dark record of linguistic prejudice through the ages. Of course, in a slang dictionary, nothing is what it seems. Elevated means "drunk"; a deep-freezer is "a girl or woman of the prim or keep-off-me type"; and stage fright is late-20th-century rhyming slang for "a (glass of) light (ale)." Are you able to descry what the jocular Seduce my ancient footwear really means? If not, consider consulting Partridge's masterwork, as large as life and twice as natural .