Madam, - In the article "What's that in plain Blinglish?" (Weekend Review, November 5th), Brian Boyd asserts, with the blinkered superiority of hindsight, that in Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, first published in 1937, the great lexicographer "could not quite bring himself to include the word 'penis' in his collection - he used instead the term 'membrum virile'."
I suggest that Mr Boyd returns to his copy of the 1937 first edition and takes his pick at the word "prick": sense 3, the penis; sense 4, an offensive or contemptuous term. It would appear that Mr Boyd's hindsight is not as clear or well-informed as Eric Partridge's master work.
Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English was, and is, a great and spirited work of accessible scholarship. Under constant revision from the day it appeared in print until his death in 1979, it ran to eight editions, the final one completed posthumously by Paul Beale, and is still in print. It has no equal: for, where any other slang dictionary may drily and anonymously offer a word and its definition, in his glosses and choices of illustration, Partridge's humanity is writ large on every page.
But that is not the end of the story. The spirit of Eric Partridge is still alive.The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, edited by Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor, is being published by Routledge on November 22nd.
It records slang in world English from 1945 to 2005 and contains the most satisfying hoard of contemporary slang imaginable. - Yours etc,
TERRY VICTOR, Editor, New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, England.