During this time Partridge also worked for three years as a schoolteacher before enrolling in the Australian Imperial Force in April 1915 and serving in the Australian infantry during the First World War,[6]inEgypt, Gallipoli and on the Western Front,[1] before being wounded in the Battle of Pozières.[6] His interest in slang and the "underside" of language is said to date from his wartime experience.[7] Partridge returned to university between 1919 and 1921, when he received his BA.[6]
After receiving his degree, Partridge became Queensland Travelling Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford,[6] where he worked on both an MA on eighteenth-century English romantic poetry, and a B.Litt in comparative literature.[8] He subsequently taught in a grammar school in Lancashire for a brief interval, then in the two years beginning September 1925, took lecturing positions at the Universities of Manchester and London.[1][9] From 1923, he "found a second home", occupying the same desk (K1) in the British Museum Library (as it was then known) for the next fifty years. In 1925 he married Agnes Dora Vye-Parminter, who in 1933 bore a daughter, Rosemary Ethel Honeywood Mann.[1][10] In 1927 he founded the Scholartis Press, which he managed until it closed in 1931.[11]
During the twenties he wrote fiction under the pseudonym 'Corrie Denison'; Glimpses, a book of stories and sketches, was published by the Scholartis Press in 1928. The Scholartis Press published more than 60 books in these four years,[1] including Songs and Slang of the British Soldier 1914-1918, which Partridge co-authored with John Brophy. From 1932 he commenced writing in earnest. His next major work on slang, Slang Today and Yesterday, appeared in 1933, and his well-known Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English followed in 1937.[1]
During the Second World War, Partridge served in the Army Education Corps, later transferring to the RAF's correspondence department, before returning to his British Museum desk in 1945.[1]
Three Personal Records of the War (with R. H. Mottram and John Easton). Scholartis Press, 1929; republished as Three Men's War: The Personal Records of Active Service (1930).
Songs and Slang of the British Soldier (with John Brophy). Scholartis Press, 1931.
A Charm of Words. New York, Macmillan Co., 1961 (copyright 1960).
A New Testament Word Book: a Glossary. London, George Routledge & Sons, 1940; republished New York, Books for Libraries Press, 1970. The 1987 republication by the Christian publisher Barbour & Company of Uhricksville, Ohio as The Book of New Testament Word Studies, with copyright claimed by the publisher, appears to be a copyright violation.
The 'Shaggy Dog' Story. New York: Philosophical Library, 1954.
A Dictionary of the Underworld. London, Macmillan Co., 1949; reprinted with new addenda, New York: Bonanza Books, 1961.
A Dictionary of RAF Slang. Michael Joseph, 1945; new edition with an introduction by Russell Ash, Pavilion Books, 1990. ISBN978-1-85145-526-3
Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang.
Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1958). Reprint: New York: Greenwich House, 1983. ISBN0-517-41425-2. Reprint: Random House Value Publishing (1988)
Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English. Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Books. Reprint: W. W. Norton & Company (1997). ISBN0-393-31709-9.
Name This Child. Hamish Hamilton.
Name Your Child. Evans Bros.
Eric Partridge in His Own Words. Edited by David Crystal. 1980. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. ISBN0-02-528960-8.
As 'Corrie Denison',
Glimpses. Scholartis Press, 1928.
"From Two Angles", a long story telling the story of the First World War from two points of view, and including many soldiers' songs, is included in A Martial Medley, Scholartis Press, 1931.
^Matthew, Colin (1997). "Birth details of Eric Partridge". Brief Lives: Twentieth-century Pen Portraits from the Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 425. ISBN9780198600879.
^Partridge, E (edited by Paul Beale) (1986) A Dictionary of Catch Phrases:from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day. Routledge (See Preface to the First Edition p. ix).
