CASSELL’S DICTIONARY OF SLANG
Edited by Jonathon Green.
This is a second and enlarged edition, subtly renamed, of the work that appeared in 1998 as The Cassell Dictionary of Slang.
Seemingly to confuse the unwary purchaser, the Orion Group has now chosen to put it out under its Weidenfeld & Nicolson imprint rather than that of Cassell, the one that justified its previous title. The new name implies that it has been compiled by someone named Cassell, rather than by Jonathon Green.
So what more do you get for your money than last time? Well, in crude measure, about 19% more (1565 pages instead of 1316). As a counterbalance, the bibliography has gone, a retrograde step that we can only hope is reversed in the next edition. There are so many changes, both large and small, that any page chosen at random for comparison between the First and Second Editions will throw up some new entries (and some old ones deleted), plus many improved etymologies and definitions. The cross-references between entries have been expanded, to an extent that the first impression, on opening at the letter A, is that the first page is almost entirely composed of them (the letter a, for example, is glossed to mean amphetamine, but 30 lines of links follow to other terms for the same drug; you could write a thesis based on following up all those references).
This is not an extraordinary occurrence: similar lists appear for other words (such as bag for scrotum, -head, a combining form that implies a person is a fool or a habitual user of some drug, off one’s base for insane or crazy, or queen in the homosexual sense), though they become less frequent as the alphabet proceeds. However, the links do not cross-reference back — for example, the entry for mollies, to which one is led from a, doesn’t provide a similar list, or a link back to the full list under the a entry — so encountering a list seems to be a matter of chance.
Jonathon Green does not limit his notes to etymology, but gives, where relevant, cultural and social background. His entry for crack, to take a good case, includes: “Its strength, alleged addictiveness and destructive popularity have made it a source of social disruption. Unlike its powdered form, known as ‘the rich man’s drug’, crack, for all that it has many middle-class devotees, is very much a drug of the ghetto and the housing estate, bringing the effects of cocaine to an underclass market.” Other entries contain discussions of origins and theories relating to the origin of a term, often by citing an earlier writer, as for instance that for hobo, a word still of deeply contentious origin among the experts, which includes a quote from Mencken. The longest such etymological discussion must surely be that for OK, which lists dozens of purported origins, though to me it is not sufficiently strongly worded to distinguish the accepted origin from the many folk etymological stories that have gone the rounds (I’d make a similar point about other entries, such as that for chav). The entry for grockle (a tourist) contains a comment from the issue of this newsletter for 22 July 2000. You read it here first.
Despite these quibbles, this work is scholastically impressive. Not only will it answer most of your questions about the world-wide use of English-language slang, but the notes and comments included with many of the entries will repay browsing. If you’re serious about looking into slang, this is an indispensable work.
[Jonathon Green, Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, Second Edition; Weidenfeld & Nicolson; hardback, pp1565; ISBN 0304366366; list price £30.00. To be published in Canada at the end of March 2006.]
