"Word King"

Pursuing the native tongue down back alleys and byway.

Eric Partridge, to coin a phrase, has done it again. At 83, the scholar of slang and connoisseur of cliches has produced his 16th lexicon, A Dictionary of Catch Phrases. Its 3,000 entries are liberally defined as sayings that have "caught on and please the public." Here are the phrases that trip resoundingly off the tongue: "Don't just stand there--do something!"; "Attaboy!" Here are the immortal quotes: "Don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes"; "All quiet on the Western front." Plus those '60s buzz words: "Cool it!"; "Tell it like it is!"

Partridge's new collection, the product of eight years of compilation, is as pleasing for its erudition as its entries. Under "It's a cinch," Partridge quotes an essay in the July 1893 issue of Harper's magazine that traced the phrase to the backpacks of mules in the U.S. Southwest. "I'll have your guts for garters!" a military expression, can be found in Robert Greene's 16th century The Scottish History of James the Fourth, Act III, Scene 2: "I'll make garters of thy guts, thou villain." "Sock it to me," of disc jockey notoriety, can be found as far back as Mark Twain: "In chapter 33 of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the Yankee, who is, naturally, the narrator, gets into a sociological argument with the smith and says: 'I prepared, now, to sock it to him ...' "

Reclining in rumpled old clothes and a shapeless nightcap in a Devon farmhouse, Partridge gives admirers the last word in biography: "I always wanted to become a writer, and I consider myself to be one." Before he began to assemble his reference books, "meant to entertain while they instruct," the Oxford-educated scholar lectured for two years at Manchester and London universities. But he quickly tired of repeating himself and tried his hand at short stories ("quite passable. Well, the New York Times thought so") and a novel ("plain bloody awful").

Soon afterward, he turned his love affair with the English language into a profession. They have been an item for 47 years, spanning forays into sexual innuendo (Shakespeare's Bawdy), A Dictionary of Cliches, and Partridge's most famous work, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Until an operation several years ago left him quite frail, Partridge spent his days in carrel K-1 of the British Museum Library, reading everything from pulp novels to plays (consuming "about 80% of all comedies written in English between 1530 and 1970" for his latest work). In the tradition of Samuel Johnson, Partridge works alone, disdaining group effort, computer printouts, even note cards. Instead, he painstakingly records entries in his old-fashioned hand in large exercise books.

An intimate acquaintance of several English tongues, Partridge was born into the proper English of New Zealand and was introduced to Australian slang as a student at the University of Queensland. He later served with the Australian army in World War I--thereby learning the military idiom--before ending his linguistic tour in the rarefied dialect of Oxford. To fill in the gaps, he relies on an extended network of correspondents. They also keep him abreast of changes that "on balance, I should say are to the good." He particularly likes "wonderful American expressions such as skyscraper" but dislikes the "pitiable" sociopsychological jargon of American professors.

Partridge, whom Edmund Wilson dubbed "the Word King," is already at work on a second, enlarged dictionary of catch phrases. His first effort has been praised by C.P. Snow for its "scholarly scrupulousness" and by George Steiner, who calls it a "sparkling, compendious work." Even so, each reader seems to find that a favorite phrase is missing or that an explanatory note is inadequate. Once that is remedied, the lexicographer says, he is through with major works. Eric Partridge fans have learned not to take him at his word. As he has written, there's life in the old dog yet (A Dictionary of Catch Phrases, page 219, column 2).

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