This dictionary deals with the little words which everyone uses every
day without even noticing them and which are so liable to escape the
grasp of a speaker of another language - clipped words, obtained by
back-clipping or apocope (the dropping of one or more final syllables),
by front-clipping or aphesis (the dropping of one or more final
syllables), by the combination of these two processes and sometimes
further transformed, especially in slang, by the addition of a new
ending. The aim is not of course merely to list all these words and say
from which longer words they were obtained; an attempt is made here to
retrace the history of each of them, its stylistic, semantic and often
morphological evolution, to illustrate this with authentic and often
pungent or humorous quotations and also to show how each can be
translated into the other language. Indeed this is an English-French
bilingual dictionary, whose aim is to translate clipped words according
to priciples of historical and register fidelity which bilingual
dictionaries do not ordinarily set for this type of headword. Thus,
clipped words will be shown to have meaning precisely because they are
clipped; consequently, this meaning must be preserved and conveyed in
translation. This dictionary thus aims at being different from
traditional bilingual dictionaries, dictionaries of slang and
colloquialisms included, in the structure and content of its articles,
in which much space is devoted to the lexicological data, which inform
the strictly lexicographical information. Special attention and care
have been devoted to the system of cross-references, the recording and
presentation of derived forms, variants and compounds and to the
presentation of slang or colloquial synonyms of the headwords. The body
of the dictionary is preceded by a preface in which the editing
principles and methods are outlined and an attempt is made at analyzing
the corpus: its historical, sociological and morphological aspects are
reviewed, together with the motivations of those that coin or use
clippings. These motivations appear essential to the proper appraisal of
this body of slang and colloquial words; this dictionary's intention is
to pay homage to all the unknown paople who have made the lexicon richer
by playing with and on words, with joyful humour, zest and gusto. It is
hoped that all lovers of words will have the same pleasure exploring
this dictionary as its author had writing it. Professor Fabrice Antoine
teaches English at the Universite Charles-de-Gaulle Lille III (France).
His research fields are bilingual lexicography, lexicology and
translation; he has been a consulting editor for a dozen bilingual
dictionaries, general as well as slang ones. He is especially interested
in French and English slang and colloquialisms and co-hairs ELEXTRA
(Etudes sur le Lexique et la Traduction), a research centre at the
University of Lille.
