The sickest collection of argot, for my money, is Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, which first appeared in the 1930s. As David Crystal noted, the book ...
was well received at the time, though when librarians discovered that it had 'those words' in it, many banned it from their shelves and it is still often available only on restricted loan.
1 Definitely, dawg!
FO' SHIZZLE makes its debut today, even though, technically speaking, it is so last decade.
Is 50 years outdated better or worse than 10 years outdated? The former seems quaint while the latter just clangs against the ear.
I totally understand the effort to be more hip and cater to the younger generation, and if this had debuted even five years ago, I think I would have liked it better.
implies the entire phrase 'fo shizzle, my nizzle' or 'for sure, my (racially charged bad word).'
It's true that it's dated language. But then so are HEP, RAD, EGAD, and other old-fashioned terms, which appear in crosswords all the time. The key is to clue things like these in similarly dated ways. For example, FO' SHIZZLE was clued as 'Definitely, dawg!', which is a contemporaneous way of saying approximately the same thing.
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