Clusterflocker John Buaas points to 3QuarksDaily‘s pointing to a very fine review by Billy Collins of the two-volume New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Want.
This would have been the perfect Christmas gift for my father, who kept both the American Heritage dictionary and a slang dictionary on the shelf above his chair at the dinner table, and who would use any excuse to pull the books down and read some definitions to us. He wouldn’t just check the word that had raised a query in the first place, but would also treat us to any other interesting terms he leafed past along the way. (It goes without saying that I am very good at that parlor game in which you try to fool people by making up dictionary definitions that sound real. I probably learned the locution “of or pertaining to” around the same time as my ABCs.)
Collins’s article inspired me to look up the words to the Fall song “Slang King.” Who ever noticed, after all these years of listening to that album, that it contains the lines
Watch, the word had right
Biz by word processor
We’ll go together, slip down down away
Hyper, with the young designers
The young designers are always there
Always wanted to be there
Not I, for sure. No idea what that’s supposed to mean, but it seems like it ought to mean something. Any Fall-heads inclined to interpretation out there? Perhaps the dictionary would help.