Is Tom Dalzell's book "The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English" authoritative?

Question

I was surfing the internet and chanced upon "The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English" edited by one Tom Dalzell. Notwithstanding the praise for the book itself, I couldn't find much about the author.

Anyhow, the books appears to be an interesting find for a linguaphile. For example, abercrombie is defined as:

1. a person devoted to prep-school fashions and style
   US, 2004

   An Abercrombie is a gorgeous but terminally preppy boy (often blond) who looks like he just stepped out of the pages of A&F Quarterly. — Brittany Kent, O.C. Undercover, p. 137, 2004 2

2. someone who strives at creating the impression of knowing all.
   US, 1945 • — Lou Shelly, Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary, p. 7, 1945

abercrombie noun 1 a person devoted to prep-school fashions and style US, 2004 • An Abercrombie is a gorgeous but terminally preppy boy (often blond) who looks like he just stepped out of the pages of A&F Quarterly. — Brittany Kent, O.C. Undercover, p. 137, 2004 2 someone who strives at creating the impression of knowing all US, 1945 • — Lou Shelly, Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary, p. 7, 1945

And I'm pretty sure the book teems with many more such colorful descriptions.

But when I searched the above word in other online dictionaries none of them seemed to define the word in such a colorful way.

Which then, instead of giving me goosebumps, leaves me doubtful as to the authenticity and merit of the book.

Any word maven here to comment on the merit of the book? And is this one those books that should be on every linguaphile's shelf? Thanking you in advance!

Further research gives:

The Routledge website has a potted Biography:

Tom Dalzell – Senior Editor -- Recognized as one of the leading expert on American slang,　 Tom Dalzell’s most recent publications include Damn the Man: Slang of the Oppressed (2011), Far Out Depends on Where You’re Standing (2012) and Vietnam War Slang: A Dictionary on Historical Principles (also published by Routledge, 2014).

His books, all slang related, can be found here https://www.routledge.com/search?author=Tom%20Dalzell.

Answer 1

My earliest acquaintance with Tom Dalzell's work involved two books he wrote for Merriam-Webster: Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang (1996) and The Slang of Sin (1998). Both are rather scattershot presentations of their subjects, with little documentation of early print occurrences of the slang terms listed. As a result, I very rarely cite either of these books in my EL&U research.

A much more impressive work is The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2006), co-edited by Dalzell and Terry Victor. This is a massively researched resource—it's more than 2,000 pages long, with citations to print occurrences of virtually every term listed and with years of first occurrence for most. Although this work invokes Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of Snag and Unconventional English, which went through eight editions from 1937 to 1984, it is not really a revision of Partridge's dictionary but a companion piece to it, focusing on slang from the past 60 years (Partridge died in 1979).

The New Partridge Dictionary is encyclopedic and quite useful. For the word and phrase origin research that I tend to focus on, I find it less helpful than J.E. Lighter's Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994/1996, which consistently includes citations to the earliest print occurrence of each slang term it covers, but which also has the grave shortcoming that it covers only the letters A through O of the alphabet, evidently owing to some sort of dispute between Lighter and the publisher), but it is a valuable resource that I regularly consult along with Jonathon Green's excellent Chambers Dictionary of Slang (2008), the eighth edition of Partridge (1984), and the Wentworth & Flexner/Chapman & Kipfer editions of Dictionary of American Slang (1960–2007). Green has an even larger dictionary of slang that I can't afford to buy.

For older slang, I recommend Farmer & Henley's voluminous Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present (1890–1904) and the resources listed in the slang portion of the "Historical Resources" answer to the EL&U Meta question What good reference works on English are available?.

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This question reminded me of a question that I asked on the main EL&U site back in April 2014: Can anyone authenticate the claim that "grungy" was used to mean "envious or jealous" in 1920s slang? In attempting to answer that question, I found that one of the earliest authorities to assert the 1920s "envious or jealous" meaning of grungy was Dalzell's Flappers 2 Rappers. Although I tried to check all of the sources that Dalzell identified for the Flapper slang portion of that reference work, I couldn't find a relevant entry for grungy in any of them.

Interestingly, the much better-documented New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English makes no mention of the supposed 1920s slang usage of grungy, either because that dictionary doesn't cover old slang or because the editors revisited their original sources of Flapper slang and found no corroboration of the old usage. Whatever their reason may have been, they give a first occurrence date for grungy of 1965.

Answer 2

You should probably avoid the entire question.

"Slang and unconventional English" is a notoriously slippery and mutable subject. Slang constantly changes, and by its nature is not universal. Individual communities constantly adopt their own usages.

At best, any attempt at recording and explicating slang will be a snapshot of usage at a particular time, and usually of a particular community or clique. As an obvious example, slang within the white community is generally different from slang within the black community, although the widespread popularity of rap and hip-hop tends to provide a certain amount of levelling between the groups. Likewise, slang among rich and poor tends to be different.

With a publication date of 2008, the Routledge dictionary is almost certainly hopelessly out of date.