Cassell's and the New Partridge set themselves different tasks and employ different methods, but, as the sniping between their editors implies, they are rivals for the same market. Green's dictionary has wide chronological limits (it goes back to the fifteenth century) and offers etymologies, but gives no citations of use; Dalzell and Victor restrict themselves to slang developed since the Second World War, and devote a great deal of space to citations drawn from novels, autobiographies, music, film, and other slang dictionaries.
These are relatively minor differences. Far more important is the fact that together these two dictionaries represent the last flourish of a grand tradition of slang collecting. Slang, of all aspects of language, is the one that changes fastest, constantly renewing itself as users seek new ways of excluding and including, and of expressing the emotional affect which drives their linguistic playfulness. It is paradoxical, then, that the study of slang should be the last area of linguistics to cling to the research paradigm of the amateur collector.
Green, like Partridge before him, is a self-supporting man of letters rather than an academic. Dalzell is a lawyer, Victor an actor, broadcaster and writer.
Green's work especially is highly scholarly in the care he takes with the historical record, but each of these dictionaries evokes nostalgia for a more heroic age when the size of one man's collection was all that mattered. In an age when dictionaries of even the standard language are compiled with the aid of massive computer corpuses of spoken English, however, it is quaint, but perverse, to find current slang represented by trawls through the cult-fiction shelves. Each of these dictionaries knows, though significantly neither says it outright, that the slang collector has been replaced. Each of these dictionaries must know the name of the replacement, but again significantly, neither can bear to give it. Well, reader, I have seen the future of slang dictionaries, and its name is UrbanDictionary.com.
UrbanDictionary was founded in the late 1990s by Aaron Peckham (then a computer science student, now a Google employee). It is a website where anyone can post a slang word or phrase, along with a definition. Competing definitions sit side by side, and users vote to approve or disapprove them; and if you are looking for a definition for a piece of recent slang, UrbanDictionary makes these two paper dictionaries look like dinosaurs glancing up at a rapidly approaching meteorite.
In terms of speed of response and coverage, UrbanDictionary (which claims
400,000 entries) leaves Green and the New Partridge flailing. Neither would help you if, like me, you were flummoxed by "the Monday Murk", the name of a regular feature on 1Xtra, the BBC's black music radio station. The feature involves listeners suggesting people, institutions, or aspects of life to be "murked" by the presenters. "Murking" (sometimes "merking") means to destroy (especially verbally), and derives from the tradition of battles between sound systems in Jamaica where DJs competed to play the best records the loudest. A winning DJ would be said to have "murked" their rival, and this has been extended to apply to a verbal contest (as in a battle between rappers), and to any inventive verbal demolition or denigration. Unusually for slang dictionaries, UrbanDictionary is written by the people who create and use the slang, so unless you have very specialized tastes indeed, it will have the precise term you didn't know you needed. If you are a gay man, both Green and the New Partridge will tell you how to "dock" with your boyfriend, but if you want to know about the difference between "docking" and "space docking" (and you wouldn't want to mix them up), then UrbanDictionary is your only hope.
Similarly, although "teabagging" is in both paper dictionaries, only the internet version will give you the full "wolf-bagging" experience. Register your phone with UrbanDictionary, and it can send you definitions as text messages.
Back in the Stone Age, Green and the New Partridge fight it out for the custom of those oldskool enough to clutter their shelves up with books. It is not much of a contest. Green will cost you Pounds 30, and claims around 90,000 entries, many with etymologies, in 1,565 pages. The two-volume New Partridge has a full price of Pounds 120, but only 65,000 entries, ambling luxuriously across 2,189 pages. This surprising discrepancy is explained by the unnecessary flab the New Partridge carries; it needs a serious edit and rethink of its citation policy.
