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I would love to have a copy of Green's Dictionary. But it actually derives from rhyming slang, where phrases are often shortened to exclude the rhyme that reveals the word intended – and, in this case, the thing imitated (“raspberry tart”). Of the 59 denitions in the Chambers dictionary, 55 are also found in Cassell’s. As the definition indicates, it doesn’t have another name – I had always dimly thought of it as a more fruity sort of “rasp”. dictionary of slang (2005), but the publicity booklet claims that ‘Chambers slang dictionary is a brand-new edition of Jonathon Green’s magisterial slang dictionary’ (1).
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A few pages on in the new dictionary, for example, Wodehouse yields a citation for the “coarse, dismissive, jeering noise” that most people would call a “raspberry”. When you begin to study it, much more familiar language reveals itself as slang. I remember my disappointment when I learnt that I was regularly missing useful citations.
#Cassell dictionary of slang full#
And because Wodehouse is full of such exuberance, marking up the books seemed a breeze. Rannygazoo (“nonsense irrelevant, irritating activity”) was an easy spot. These related the adventures of Psmith, the man about town who revelled in such phrases as “last night’s rannygazoo” several years before Bertie Wooster began to bounce them off the silver-plated English of Jeeves. Training began with a pile of early PG Wodehouse novels. Writing in The Telegraph, Jeremy Noel-Tod (a contributor to the dictionary) describes how it was compiled from a variety of sources including the works of P G Wodehouse: Now, however, it looks as though the new gold standard in dictionaries of slang will be the new three-volume Green's Dictionary. I have the Partidge Dictionary and I have the Cassell Dictionary.