PARTRIDGE, Eric (Honeywood) [1894–1979]. New Zealand-born lexicorgrapher, and writer on
USAGE and other subjects, born in Waimata Valley, North Island, and educated in Australia. His studies at the U. of Queensland were interrupted by four years as a private in the Australian infantry during the First World War, in which he saw action at Gallipoli and the Somme. In the Second World War, though over military age, he again volunteered. After a spell as an army education officer he was invalided out, only to join the Royal Air Force, in which, after serving as a storeman, he became clerk to ‘Writer Command’, a group of writers including H. E. Bates, John Pudney, and W. Vernon Noble. The group was commissioned to publicize the Service. His military experiences, and encounters with all sorts and conditions of men, reinforced a lifelong interest in the underside of the language.
After graduating, he became a Queensland Travelling Fellow at Oxford. Having gained an MA and B.Litt. simultaneously there, he taught at the universities of Manchester and London, but boredom and dislike of lecturing made him found his own publishing firm, Scholartis, in 1927. Partridge's most important publications were (with John Brophy) the discursive glossary
Songs and Slang of the British Soldier in the Great War (1930) and his annotated version of
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by Francis Grose (1931). Cecil Franklin, chairman of the London publishers Routledge & Kegan Paul, saw the potential of these works, and, when Scholartis closed because of the Depression in 1931, commissioned Partridge to produce a comprehensive dictionary of
SLANG.
Published in 1937,
A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English was a worldwide success. It was followed by:
Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English (1942);
Shakespeare's Bawdy (1947);
A Dictionary of the Underworld (1950);
Origins: An Etymological Dictionary of English (1958);
A Dictionary of Catch Phrases (1977); and over 20 other books of essays on language, some prescriptive, some descriptive. Partridge's influence has been twofold: generating curiosity about the language among its speakers in all walks of life; working for the adequate lexicographical coverage of
COLLOQUIAL and
TABOO usage, a procedure now, partly as a result of his influence, standard for major dictionaries.
