I FIRST became acquainted with Eric Partridge in the 1960s, when he was already old but still very vigorous. I had been commissioned by Penguin Books to produce a dictionary of contemporary slang, but I did not want to do it. My agent had, however, accepted the advance, which I later had to return, though not she her ten per cent. I toiled at the letter B, always the biggest section of an English dictionary, and saw the problems. ‘Contemporary’ means from now on till the end of time. I envisaged a life spent in updating the dictionary. When I had finished B ‘bovver boots’ came in and had to be admitted. Meeting Eric Partridge by chance at his club when I was lunching with somebody else, I had the chance to discuss the whole lexicographical agony with him.
First, though, knowing of my project, he cordially invited me to cannibalise him to the limit: dictionary-making was a matter of eating others and always had been. Then he admitted that his craft was one of perpetual revision, that no dictionary was a finished book but merely a photograph of the language at a point in time, always ready to be replaced with a new picture. His life was mostly given up to dealing with correspondents, most of whom were helpful. I became one of those correspondents myself when I decided that I was not a dictionary man, one of the thousands who sent him new words, idioms and etymologies. One of the pleasures of new editions of his slang dictionary was in meeting expressions of warmth, gratitude, friendship within the text itself.
Eric was a human lexicographer, like Samuel Johnson. He was a philologist rather than a linguist. He knew what Chomsky was doing and what had happened to phonology in Prague, but he eschewed the strict scientific approach. Linguistics is scared of semantics and prefers to concentrate on structures, leaving the study of the meaning of words to anthropologists – or, perhaps with misgivings, to Johnsonian word-lovers like Eric Partridge. Eric’s etymologies were often, as he admitted, shaky, but he preferred a shaky etymology to none at all. I remember discussing with him the origin of the word camp. As it happened, I had written an article in the Spectator using the word, and a retired general had asked precisely what it meant and where it came from. I wrote a letter of some length in explication but got no thanks. My view was that camp had nothing to do with kempt. I thought of camp concert parties with men dressed up as girls and making exaggerated feminine gestures; I thought of those camps set up in nineteenth-century America for the construction of the railroads, when a temporary homosexual culture developed with secondary features of effeminate display. The latest general dictionary (Collins, 1979) defines camp and its derivatives admirably but says ‘etymology unknown’. I maintain, as Eric always did, that it is better to guess than to be silent. This is amateurish, but it is human.
No academic linguist could be expected to be interested in frivolities like the ‘comic alphabets’ on which Eric wrote a whole book. I had, like him, heard Clapham and Dwyer on the radio in the 1930s reciting the whole liturgy: ‘A for orses, B for mutton, C forth highlanders, D for payment,’ and so on, penultimating with the brilliant ‘Y for secretary’. I forget Z). What fascinated Eric in the direction of his book was the anonymous human brilliance of this fantasy, and it was the creativity of the humble users of language which, of course, inspired him to that lifelong devotion to slang and catch phrases which produced the great dictionaries. The catch phrase book, which, alas, he did not live to be able to complete revising and enriching, got a great number of his admirers digging in their memories. I wanted him to put in (from ITMA) ‘NWAWWASBE’ – never wash a window with a soft boiled egg – and great gestures of phatic communion like ‘Roll on death and let’s have a go at the angels’ and ‘Put another pea in the pot and hang the expense’ and ‘Never mind, lads, it’ll soon be Christmas’. Many people did not appreciate these catch phrases. I wrote a novel in which a character says, ‘Ah well, as one door shuts another door closes’ and this was silently corrected to a statement that made sense. Naturally, I unsilently uncorrected it.
Eric had learnt these ludic tropes and others like them in the army. It was in the army that I learned to appreciate the great humorous stoicism of ordinary men and the way in which they expressed it in language. He, like myself, was fascinated by the slow folk development from trope to trope in the direction of greater sardonic truth. In 1939 soldiers were saying: ‘The army can do anything to you including fuck you.’ This, in 1941, had become ‘The army can fuck you but it can’t make you have a kid.’ At the end of the war the army could give you a kid but it couldn’t make you love it. I don’t know what the latest embellishment is.
A New Zealander, an Australian, hence a great mistruster of what Joyce called ‘those big words that make us all unhappy’, Eric was brought up in a kind of dispossessed demotic tradition which prized the speech of the people as the repository of a dour philosophy of life. The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang, hurl pithiness and colour at poverty and oppression. Language is not, like everything else, in the hands of the haughty and educated: it is the people’s property, and sometimes all they have.
I would have wished that Eric, who spoke the finest classless English of his generation, could have paid some attention to the pronunciation of demotic speech, though of course he had enough to do in other linguistic fields. I have always had my tinpot theories about, for instance, the relation of Cockney pronunciation to the whole corpus of English phonology, but I have never dared – as he might have done – to present possibly false but probably acceptable speculations. Why, for instance, are v and w interchangeable in the speech of Sam Weller? I like to believe that traditional London speech had a bilabial fricative, as in the Spanish vaso, which served for both the voiced labio-dental and the voiced labial semivowel. Dickens, hearing the sound, knew it was not quite right but could not tell how it really differed from standard phonemic use: hence he effected a literal transposition. Sam Weller’s rendering of widow was neither vidder nor wider but /βidə/. As Eric made the study of meanings and (in his Origins) etymology great philosophical joy, so he might have ventured imaginative flights about the Great Vowel Shift and related, with humanity and humour, the pronunciation of Shakespeare’s English to that of modern Dublin or Boston. After all, it was language as a living experience that concerned him.
For Dublin’s Swift, or rather his modern readers, he performed a great service. The Polite Conversations were perfectly annotated, and those dialogues in which nothing is really said were shown to be a kind of ultimate repository of socio-linguistic truth, demonstrating that conversation is never about anything but it is perhaps the only thing that matters. For Shakespeare he performed a service which more orthodox scholars winced at. In Shakespeare’s Bawdy, it was alleged, he dug out more dirt from Shakespeare than was really there. The ‘Will’ sonnet, for instance, was shown to be a virtuoso concert about the male and female pudenda. I do not think Eric went very far wrong, and if he did it was on the right side. (In his imagined presence one need never be ashamed of bulls.) Slang was, as he showed, mainly subversive. Literature was closer to slang than to governmental directives, and that had to be subversive too. The people’s way of being subversive had always lain in the, figurative, lowering of trousers and the raising of skirts. ‘Apples be ripe and nuts be brown. Petticoats up and breeches down.’ Slang and literature alike tend to greater obscenity than decent people like to imagine. Eric celebrated indecency.
Because he dealt in a field traditionally trivial, as well as subversive, Eric never received the public honours that were his due. He served the Queen (and Kings before her) as well by glorying in the posterior of her, and their, English as staider men did by debasing it (I am thinking of politicians and newspaper proprietors, not jockeys). He never visited America to tell Americans about the riches of their own language. Reading room, study, club sufficed him, and the pleasure of having friends who, like him, loved English. I once toasted him with ‘May you live for ever and I live to bury you.’ Sadly, the second clause has just about been fulfilled. So, not sadly at all and not fancifully either, is, or will be, or is being, the first.
From Eric Partridge In His Own Words, ed. David Crystal
(London: Macmillan, 1981)