Thankfully, the heirs to Partridge’s legacy continue to uphold the value of rigorous slang-ology. And for the more ephemeral slang that the print dictionaries fail to cover, well, don’t we have Urban Dictionary and other online user-generated repositories for that? Now, nearly 75 years later, can a slang dictionary possibly hope to uncover any “lost words”? Are there any unmentionables left to mention? After all, mainstream English dictionaries now make ample space for slang, much to the chagrin of traditionalists alarmed by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate including “ginormous” (gasp!) or the Oxford English Dictionary including “bootylicious” (double gasp!). “The unmentionables are mentioned and carefully placed in proper alphabetical form.”
“The lost words of the language have finally come to roost,” it began. Back in 1937, when Eric Partridge’s groundbreaking “Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English” was first published, The New York Times Book Review ran a glowing notice.
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