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Was voyeuristic, to be sure, but also practical: knowing what the ruffians were talking about might help you avoid getting your pocket picked if you ventured into the wrong neighborhood.Īlong with a slew of terms for loose women and strong drink, B. But English gentility was fascinated by the crude, mysterious vocabulary of the “canting crew.” The interest “gentleman” - ironic considering how ungentlemanly his dictionary was. Then as cant: the special underworld language of petty thieves, beggars and other dangerous riffraff. What the compiler of the dictionary would have said was that he was collecting not slang, but 'cant terms,' the jargon of thieves and beggars. What the author of the 1699 volume sought to document was known This has now been reissued by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, as The First English Dictionary of Slang 1699, even though there was nothing known as slang in 1699 that term was first recorded in 1756. Containing over 60,000 entries, this new. The heir and successor to Eric Partridge's brilliant magnum opus, The Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, this two-volume New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is the definitive record of post WWII slang. The title bestowed by the Bodleian is a bit anachronistic, as the actual word slang isn’t even recorded until 1756, according to the O.E.D. The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.