Once “oiks” (n. a disagreeable youth, U.K., 1925) have overrun completely the civilized world, we ladies and gentlemen won’t be able to make out a word they’re saying. As Theodore Dalrymple noted, writing on A Clockwork Orange in the Winter 2006 City Journal, there’s a crystal-clear reason for that:
[Burgess] marks the separateness of his novel’s young protagonists from their elders by their adoption of a new argot . . . . Vital for groups antagonistic toward the dominant society around them, such argots allow them to identify and communicate with insiders and exclude outsiders. Although I worked in a prison for fourteen years . . . I never came to understand the language that prisoners used.
We now possess, like a Berlitz guide to the language of the End Times, a marvelous new two-volume dictionary of “slang and unconventional English” (The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang & Unconventional English, by Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor; Routledge, 2400 pages, $175). In their preface, the editors tell us that “Eric Partridge made a deep and enduring contribution to the study and understanding of slang” with his “eight editions of The Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English published between 1937 and 1984.” The editors’ mission is simple: “Just as Partridge did for the sixteenth-century beggars and rakes, for whores of the eighteenth century, and for the armed services of the two world wars, we try to do for the slang users of the last sixty years.”
I know of no other tome, with the possible exception of Iona and Peter Opie’s 1959 Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, that affords so complete and so completely entertaining a guide to the chatter of strange classes. (I was a schoolchild once, but not in 1959—and I don’t think I belong to the phylum that includes “beats, hipsters, Teddy Boys, mods and rockers, hippies, pimps, druggies, whores, punks, skinheads, ravers, surfers, Valley Girls, dudes, pill-popping truck drivers, hackers, rappers.”)
Where else can one learn, for instance, that the state that gave us Bill Clinton has been commemorated by such phrases as “Arkansas credit card” (“a hose used to syphon petrol from another car”) and “Arkansas flush” (“in poker, a worthless hand consisting of four cards in one suit and a fifth in another”)?
In Australia, a thief is “hydraulic” (he’ll lift anything); the snitch who rats him out is a “fizzgig.” In New Zealand, a “hoonmobile” is a “lout-driven car,” which suggests that Kiwis still take a dim view of their native oiks. In the U.K., well . . . I could go on, but I’m bloody well cream crackered, which is to say knackered, which is to say tuckered, and you know what that means.