Partridge, Eric
Eric Partridge (1894–1979) was an intrepid explorer of the lexical underworld, a highly industrious and productive lexicographer in the slang tradition of Francis Grose in the eighteenth century and Farmer and Henley in the nineteenth. Born in New Zealand, he studied in Australia and fought with the ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand forces) in World War I in Egypt and Gallipoli before being injured at the Battle of the Somme in 1915. He resumed his studies in Australia, continued at Oxford, and lectured briefly at the universities of Manchester and London. These experiences put him in touch with many varieties of English, both geographically and in terms of register, on which he was to produce a number of major contributions. In 1927 he abandoned academe, becoming an almost permanent feature in the Reading Room of the British Museum, where he worked for fifty years. He also founded the Scholartis Press, which became the vehicle for several of his early lexicographical and philological productions, prior to a long a fruitful association with the publishers Routledge.
His expanded edition of Francis Grose ‘s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1931) was his major early work. To Grose’s usually sharp, succinct definitions and comments, Partridge added his considerable knowledge. Thus Grose’s rather evasive entry “C**t. The konnos of the Greek and the cunnus of the Latin dictionaries; a nasty name for a nasty thing” is amplified by two pages of lexicographical, etymological, and sociolinguistic information. His substantial study Slang Today and Yesterday (1933) was structured on both regional and historical bases, and contained in its 470 pages some twenty-five different kinds of specialist slang, ranging from Cockney, the Law, the Church, the Theatre, Sailors, Soldiers, and Yiddish, as well as the American and various colonial varieties. This was followed by A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937) and A Dictionary of the Underworld (1949), dealing with both English and American varieties.
Perhaps his most illuminating and original work was Shakespeare’s Bawdy (1947), which carried the trenchant remark in the Preface: “If Shakespearean criticism had not so largely been in the hands of academics and cranks, a study of Shakespeare’s attitude towards sex and his use of the broad jest might have appeared at any time since 1918” (vii). Partridge elucidated the surprising, even shocking, volume of double-entendres and bawdy jests beneath the apparently bland and innocent surface of the Shakespearean text, produced under circumstances of fairly stringent censorship. The aim was not simply to be salacious, but to illuminate the extraordinary ironies and overtones that can reverberate from a simple exchange. Thus Hamlet’s farewell to Ophelia: “Get thee to a nunnery,” seemingly poignant, becomes a bitter, double-edged rejection when it is explained that in Elizabethan slang nunnery had the ironic sense of “brothel.” Similarly, the coded slang usage of nothing to mean “an ‘o’ thing,” that is, the vagina, adds spice to the title of Much Ado About Nothing , and is clearly so used by Hamlet in his riposte to Ophelia’s comment “I think nothing my lord,” namely, “That’s a fair thought to lie between maid’s legs” (III iv 111-12). Partridge is direct in exploring what he calls “the fertility and ingenuity of Shakespeare’s amative fancy” by listing dozens of terms he categorizes as “the pudend-synonymy” (1947, 24). He was also the first scholar to bring out the important and complex aspects of class and gender in bawdy:
Sexual dialogue between men is, no less in Shakespeare than in the smoking-room or compartment, frank and often coarse; between members of the lower classes, both coarse and, often, brutal; between members of the middle class—well we hear very little of that!; between aristocrats and other members of the upper and leisured class, it is still frank—it is frequently very frank indeed—but is also witty. (1947, 34)
Partridge’s etymological dictionary Origins followed in 1958. It was original in that entries started with remote roots, not with the conventional headwords, making the search more interesting and surprising. In addition he wrote a number of works more in the prescriptive tradition, such as Usage and Abusage (1942); Chamber of Horrors , “a Glossary of Official Jargon” (1952); and You Have Point There (1953), on punctuation. In all he wrote some thirty-five works, many of which went through several editions. Unlike most modern lexicographers who operate in teams, Partridge worked alone, chiefly in difficult and little-charted territory. This quality gives his works the freedom, personality, and character of his great predecessors, Francis Grose and Samuel Johnson, although it also exposes him to the risk of error. Some have pointed out questionable etymologies in his work, but the Oxford English Dictionary cites him more than 770 times, since frequently the first recorded instance of some idiomatic phrase is found in one his voluminous collections.
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