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.” 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 Language and Lore of Schoolchildren