`DUCKETS: n. American. Money, dollars. An appropriation of the archaic ducats (Venetian gold coins used all over Renaissance Europe) heard in black street argot and campus and high-school slang in the 1990s."
Well, personally I wish to say that any party who will take a swivel at the literature of the late Mr Runyon will know that as far back as 1930, duckets is being utilised no little, and in fact quite some, by nobody but Louie the Lug, Sam the Gonoph, Joey Uptown and other such prominent citizens. They will employ it, by no means in direct reference to finnifs, coarse notes, sawbucks, mazuma and other potatoes, but to the tickets required for admission to such as a double-header at Belmont Raceway or Mr Georgie White's Scandals. But it comes down to the same thing in the end. What goes around comes around.
Likewise, of cheaters (sunglasses), Mr Thorne writes: "A word now popular with schoolchildren", but fails to make even a stab at dating it. Has he never heard Louis Armstrong singing Jeepers Creepers (1938): "When you turn those heaters on/Woe is me, got to put my cheaters on"? Or that the dreaded lurgi, meaning an unspecified disease, was not only "much used by schoolchildren in the 1950s", but owes its currency at the time specifically to The Goon Show?
That "contemporary" in the title is rather a moveable feast, roaming back as far as the 19th century (Aristotle, arry, a bottle, London rhyming slang). And "slang" is sometimes loosely defined, too. Didicoi, for a gypsy, is hardly that, deriving as it does directly from the Romany word, didakeis. And is Acapulco Gold not merely the botanic classification of a highly regarded funnycigarette tobacco?
Still, everybody always has their own picayune nit-picks about these collections. To borrow and bowdlerise one of Mr Thorne's entries, this remains a BSD, a Big Swinging Dictionary.
Ace boon coon, for an instance, has a nice ring to it, and might be defined with more PC as a fellow African-American of surpassing excellence with whom one enjoys a mutually satisfying relationship. But that loses a little in the translation. And, from the British racial scene, frustafarian is neat, meaning "a young person of wealthy origin frequenting the milieux of London ghetto-dwellers".
Speaking of across the water, it is noteworthy that rhyming slang is still alive and vibrant there, and relying much on celebrities for its raw material - Tony Blairs (flares), Benny Hill (cash till), David Gower (shower) - though Ms Emma Freud can hardly relish the fact that her (pluralised) name refers to, er, piles.
Nor is this island neglected. (The) crack is in here, thankfully without the ersatz-Erse craic, and so is banjaxed, its dissemination outside these shores rightly credited to Mr Terry Wogan. In 1970s London, Guinness was seemingly often known as Nigerian lager, for obvious pigmentary reasons. But it is deracinating to learn that gobshite is "Liverpudlian and north British" in origin, while blow-in is Australian.
Indeed, Australia looks to have overtaken the US as the wellspring of vivid terminology, for which much of the credit must go to Mr Barry Humphries and his comic-strip alter ego, Bazza McKenzie: technicolor yawn, aiming Archie at the Armitage, Schindler's (drunk) and so on. The Antipodean variation on the Imperial gyppy tummy and Delhi belly relocates them to the Pacific Rim, with Bali belly (free rhyme, pleasingly alliterative). Americans, especially those who visit Mexico, prefer the Aztec two-step.
Not in this dictionary yet, but spotted in one of the papers the other day, and to be applied to such prominent citizens as Mr Chris Evans, Mr Danny Baker and Mr Paul Gascoigne: the giterati. Maybe next edition, which there will surely be, because "contemporary" goes out of date faster than a New York minute.
Godfrey Fitzsimons is an Irish Times staff journalist