by Max Décharné
Once war had broken out again across Europe, civilians sitting in their Anderson shelters in October 1940 and awaiting the all-clear signal, as German bombing raids on London intensified, could have passed the time by catching up on current army slang and its origins in an edition of the Manchester Guardian:
Although the Army in the first German War made some use of rhyming slang, it was not allowed to displace many of the old soldiers’ words derived from service in India. Some of them, it is true, are still current: in the battalion in which I am now serving (writes ‘B’) porridge is always ‘burgoo’ and jam is ‘pozzie,’ but instead of ‘rooty and muckin’ for bread and butter we hear of ‘Uncle Ned’ or ‘strike me dead,’ and ‘roll-in-the-gutter.’ The rot had begun twenty-five years ago. Tea was then almost always known as ‘char,’ but even so I can well remember a sergeant’s saying he had got some ‘Tom Thumb in his i-diddle-dee,’ when he had scrounged some rum and put it in his tea.
Sometimes, of course, despite all the cockneyisms, tea in the British Army was simply tea, as in Private’s Progress, Alan Hackney’s 1954 novel of wartime conscript Stanley Windrush, where the soldiers head for the canteen for tea and a wad (cake or a bun). However, knowing the influence of London jargon, Stanley’s father, a keen student of old popular songs, asks him in a letter to look out for anyone singing a tune entitled ‘Gorblimey innit all right, eh?’, whose lyrics he is eager to learn.
Everything’s FUBAR in Skunk Hollow
IN AMERICA, EVEN IN PEACETIME, Life magazine was always keen to keep its readership aware of military slang trends. ‘“Shut-eye” is army slang for sleep,’ they declared in 1937, employing a phrase which had been British forces’ slang since at least the 1890s. Three years later, a corporal in the medical department at Fort McIntosh, in Laredo, Texas, wrote a letter to Life claiming that ‘we have just about the best slang there is. . . When I say we, I mean about 17 boys here at the hospital.’ The examples he provided included lapping it up (drinking beer), pocket lettuce (paper money), chili bowl (a haircut), slum (the main dish at any meal) and Butch (the commanding officer). Then in February 1941 – still ten months ahead of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which brought America into the war – the Manchester Guardian wrote an article giving numerous examples of US military speech, claiming that ‘even an expert of contemporary slang would be lost in the Army camps without a special dictionary’:
‘Blame Hitler’ is the answer to all complaints of every variety. ‘The old man in the poodle palace’ is the commanding general in his headquarters. ‘Mit-fiapping’ (from the slang ‘mit’ for hand) describes a soldier who tries to win the favour of a superior officer. . . Regular enlisted men are called ‘goons,’ while the new recruits are ‘jeeps’ and ‘yard birds,’ whose barracks are ‘Jeepville’ or ‘Skunk Hollow.’ . . . A soldier with long experience is ‘dog face,’ and the man who shines the officer’s boots is ‘the captain’s dog robber.’
The word goon had been an insult for two decades by then – meaning a stupid or oafish person – and would come to be the preferred term Allied servicemen in POW camps used for their German guards – so it is interesting to see it being applied here by ordinary soldiers to their own selves. This was all good clean fun among troops who were on home bases, in a country not yet at war, but in May 1945 information about this kind of slang could perhaps be classed as a military secret, as an article in a New Zealand paper, the Auckland Star – based on a report from the British United Press correspondent in London – made clear:
When the Germans began the Ardennes offensive last December, Lieutenant-Colonel Skorzeny, Nazi master spy, dispatched 150 spies, with American accents, behind Allied lines in the war’s most ambitious sabotage operation. . . They were put into American prisoner of war cages to pick up an accent and slang. They were instructed in American customs, even down to the method of opening a packet of cigarettes. The spies were then issued with American uniforms, weapons and jeeps, but the Germans made two errors. They did not issue identification discs and they gave the men poor forgeries of American identity cards.
All but ten of the men were either shot while escaping or executed, making the botched operation in US Army slang at the time either a SNAFU (situation normal – all fucked up), or probably its more serious variant, FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition). The former phrase was widespread enough that a disaster-prone cartoon character was created by the US Armed Forces Motion Picture Unit in 1943 under Frank Capra named Private Snafu, who was used in a series of training cartoons shown to soldiers, which were directed by leading figures in the field such as Chuck Jones and Fritz Freleng. Knowing their audience, they spelled out the meaning of the word letter by letter at the beginning, pausing a little before F and then saying fouled up, aware that army viewers would be familiar with the real version. Indeed, in October 1944, when a Broadway play by Louis Solomon and Harold Buckman entitled SNAFU opened at the Hudson Theatre, Billboard’s reviewer Bob Francis commented:
According to [producer] George Abbott’s press department, Snafu in army slang, means situation normal, all fouled up.’ G.I. Joe may tell you different, but that at least is a fair approximation.
By the time of the Vietnam war – a conflict of murky origins even for the better informed of those who were drafted, in which young men were taken from a land in which turning on, digging thy self or simply letting it all hang out were touted in some circles as valid career choices and were then flown direct to a war-torn jungle – the language of US combat troops had become even more stark. New recruits were no longer a jeep, they were an FNG (fucking new guy), food was not called slum but usually beans and motherfuckers (a C-ration staple of lima beans and ham), FUBAR had mostly given way to fugazi (fucked up), pogue was an insulting term for non-front-line military personnel (as opposed to the London Irish band The Pogues, who shortened their name from Pogue Mahone, which is Gaelic for kiss my arse), and, as ex-combat soldiers explained to the writer Mark Baker for his oral history Nam (1981), the slang phrase double veteran meant ‘having sex with a woman and then killing her’.
Absorbing the milder parts of this slang during your first few weeks in Vietnam was part of the induction course, as Tim O’Brien wrote in his memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973):
I learned that REMF means ‘rear echelon motherfucker’; that a man is getting ‘short’ after his fourth or fifth month; that a hand grenade is really a ‘frag’ [fragmentation grenade]; that one bullet is all it takes and that ‘you never hear the one that gets you’; that no-one in Alpha Company knows or cares about the cause or purpose of their war; it is about ‘dinks and slopes’, and the idea is simply to kill them or avoid them. Except that in Alpha you don’t kill a man, you ‘waste’ him.
As a rule, it was the enlisted men at the lower end of the military hierarchy who came up with the slang, but in this particular war one of the commanders at the top coined a phrase which has since passed into the language, usually rendered as bomb them back into the Stone Age. This came from the 1965 autobiography of United States Air Force General Curtis E. LeMay (Mission With LeMay: My Story – co-written with MacKinlay Kantor), and although he later apparently sought to qualify the statement, the original seems relatively unambiguous:
My solution to the problem would be to tell [the North Vietnamese communists] frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power – not with ground forces.
Scab lifters and gronk boards
FOR AN ISLAND NATION, sea terms have always been a significant part of everyday speech, and over centuries the Royal Navy has built up a large body of slang. When my grandfather joined the navy in 1942, at the start of four years of wartime service, he was given the current edition of the Manual of Seamanship, issued by the Admiralty, which contained much useful information concerning navigation, signalling, naval
routine, hammock-slinging, life-saving and suchlike. The final chapter dealt with ‘Sea Terms and the Boatswain’s Call’. Here, alongside more specific expressions such as athwartships (‘at right angles to the fore and aft line’), lay some words and phrases which have since passed into more general use. Cracking on is defined as ‘to set more sail’, which has now become a way of saying to hurry up. A granny’s knot was defined as ‘a term of contempt applied when a reef knot is crossed the wrong way’, and a trick was a ‘spell a man has at the wheel, look-out, chains, etc.’ – all words that dated back a long way into the age of sail, and which could also be found in Admiral W. H. Smyth’s exhaustive 19th-century reference work The Sailor’s Word-Book: An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms (1867). The latter contained many technical expressions, of course, but also some fine examples of what the author defined as galley-slang – ‘the neological barbarisms foisted into sea-language’ – and with a due sense of civic pride, I note that my home city made an appearance in the phrase point-heacher – ‘a low woman of Portsmouth’.
Of course, one thing that the Manual of Seamanship and the Sailor’s Word-Book omitted in their lists of nautical terms was the vast profusion of downright smutty slang words to be found on board ship in every generation – a state of affairs acknowledged by the book reviewer of the Glasgow Herald in 1886, when praising a new seagoing tale for children entitled Spunyarn and Spindrift by Robert Brown:
We have seldom read better nautical slang. It is not a faithful reproduction, of course, for the habitual language of the forecastle is simply foul, but it is a refined preparation of the real thing, and quite refreshing in its vigorous suggestiveness.
Forty years after my grandfather joined the navy, my cousin David Yates served on board HMS Antrim through some of the most intensive air–sea fighting of the Falklands war. When he wrote his book describing those times, Bomb Alley – Falkland Islands, 1982 (2006), he included a glossary of below-decks navy terms which also displayed a vigorous suggestiveness, such as pig (‘an officer’), scab lifter (‘any sickbay staff’), pongoes (‘any member of the army’) and gronk board (‘noticeboard for displaying pictures and other lewd female memorabilia’). In addition to this, having responsibilities in the ship’s catering section, he provided a further Naval Cook’s Glossary, decoding the meaning of such gastronomic highlights as colon collapser (vindaloo), leper’s hankies (pizza), germolene sandwiches (deep-fried spam fritters in a bread roll), mermaid’s piss (vinegar), frog in a bog (toad in the hole) and, for the discerning palate, excreta à la Kontiki (French garlic kidneys on toast).
Whether such delicacies were also available to the sailors in the Royal New Zealand Navy in 1944 is hard to say, but a report in the Evening Post, from Wellington, noted that ‘examples of current Navy slang are:- Up Spooks (tot of rum), Gate (idle chatter), Ash-cans (depth charges), “Get a bottle” (reprimand), Plew (tea), Gish (anything extra, like leave)’.
The US Navy was also calling depth charges ash cans at that time, as an article in a 1940 issue of Life magazine by Oliver Jensen about their nautical slang records, which, given that both navies were active in the Pacific, is hardly surprising. Jensen recorded a fair few current American expressions, such as calling the women they met on shore leave sea gulls (‘because they follow the fleet’), but, as is usual with occupational slang, many of them had a more venerable history. He writes that they refer to ‘the chaplain as padre (whatever his denomination) and the chaplain’s assistant as Holy Joe’, the latter expression having appeared three-quarters of a century earlier in John Camden Hotten’s 1874 edition of his Slang Dictionary as ‘a sea-term for a parson’. Similarly, using the word chow as a term for ‘food in general’ would not have surprised the 19th-century British Army in India, as recorded in Yule and Burnell’s classic work on the language of those days, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases (1886): ‘Chow is “pigeon” [pidgin English] applied to food of all kinds’. Looking back a little further, W. H. Smyth’s The Sailor’s Word-Book (1867) contains the entry chow-chow, defined as ‘eatables; a word borrowed from the Chinese’.
Finally, Jensen rightly remarked that ‘many a common slang expression like “down the hatch” and “tell it to the Marines!” has come from the sea’. At the time he was writing, in 1940, the former was relatively new as a drinking salutation. The first listing in the OED dates from a 1931 article in H. L. Menken’s magazine the American Mercury. A search through British newspapers of the early 20th century for this phrase only reveals stories about people or objects falling down the hatch of a ship. However, in July 1936, the Daily Express published a report on the return to Southampton of two members of the crew of a ‘runaway Grimsby trawler’ which had made a journey all the way across the ocean to the colony of British Guiana in South America. One of them raised his pint to their reporter and said, ‘Here’s down the hatch. Here’s to England again.’ However, tell it to the marines – an expression of disbelief or scorn at an unlikely story – is of far older vintage, being first recorded in John Davis’s 1806 novel of the Royal Navy at the time of Lord Nelson, The Post-Captain – Or, the Wooden Wails Well Manned; Comprehending a View of Naval Society and Manners, in which it appears as something of a recurring mantra, such as: ‘“Belay there!” cried the captain; “you may tell that to the marines, but I’ll be d— if the sailors will believe it.”’ The original meaning, therefore, casts the marines in the role of gullible dupes as compared to ordinary seamen, but over the years, once the expression became popular in America, the sense has been altered. The new implication is that you might tell such a stupid story to other people and they would accept it, but if you told it to the US Marines – who have supposedly been everywhere and seen everything – then they will recognise it for the nonsense that it is. This variant, unsurprisingly, seems to be the one favoured currently by the marines themselves.
In a flap with a corker
IF SALTY OLD SEA-DOGS COULD at one time be identified on the stage and in comic books by their fondness for expressions such as belay there!, so too might the slang of an RAF veteran in the years following the Second World War be easily distinguishable. For instance, the young legal clerk Mr Drudge in Margery Allingham’s 1948 crime novel More Work for the Undertaker is an ex-fighter pilot, and certainly talks the language:
Well, I’ve been chinning with the old Skip and he says Bang on, jolly good show, first ray of light they’ve shown. Here’s the essential gen.
It was not just crime-fiction readers who encountered such language at the time. Schoolchildren with a taste for the works of Captain W. E. Johns could find it liberally sprinkled through his work, as in Biggies Takes the Case (1952): ‘“Suppose you give me the gen,” requested Ginger, slipping into R. A. F. jargon,’ while Biggies himself in the same book is heard to exclaim, ‘Suffering Icarus! That certainly is a bone-shaker.’
Some authentic wartime examples of such speech found their way into the newspapers even as the Battle of Britain raged overhead in the summer of 1940. A photo report in the Daily Express on 6 August that year showed various fighter pilots under the headline, ‘They Have Just Been Destroying Messerschmitts’, with a caption saying:
‘Plummers’ (slang for armourers) feed belts of ‘ammo’ (ammunition) into the wing machine-guns. . . . A sergeant-pilot has his mascot painted on his ‘Mae West’ (rhyming slang for vest).
Anyone searching for more examples of such speech might perhaps wish to consult a thirty-six-page pamphlet by one ‘H. W.’ (Ernest L. H. Williams), entitled What’s the Gen? – R.A.F. Slang, Illustrated, published hot on the heels of the Battle of Britain in 1942, whose cover cartoon showed vividly how the term Mae West was not simply rhyming slang, but also a literal comment on the supposed resemblance between an inflated life-jacket and the chest of the Hollywood film star. As the author explained in his preface: ‘Many of the expressions are new. Some are old. Others cannot be included for a variety of reasons.’ To take just a few examples:
squirt, to give a to open fire
body snatcher, a a stretcher bearer
gen, the the low down; correct information
wind in your neck shut up
Queen, a a star performer of the fair sex
flap, in a over active
mixed death various types of ammunition
crack at, to have a to try
six letter man, the Hitler
humid without personality, wet
cart, in the in trouble
kite, a an aircraft
good show, a a meritorious performance
corker, a a mine, or sometimes a young woman
bind, a an irksome task, performed with difficulty; a bore
The word bind was immortalised for BBC radio listeners in the title of the comedy series Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh, set on a fictional RAF base, which began broadcasting in 1944 and ran in one form or another for a decade. A year after it started, Eric Partridge published A Dictionary of RAF Slang, in which he considered the origins of such language, as compared to that of the army and the navy:
The Air Force had a small body of slang even when it was the Royal Flying Corps. The RAF has many more slang terms than were possessed by the RFC, although the total number of its terms is very much smaller than those of the two senior Services.
Although they existed, only a handful of Royal Flying Corps slang words made their way into British newspapers during the First World War, owing to the more formal nature of the aerial combat reports issued by the authorities. One such term – which appeared in a British pilot’s first-person account of a dogfight with a German fighter, published in The Times in February 1916 – happened to be the term spit-fire, meaning the sight of a gun muzzle-flash (‘a series of “spit-fires” from his centre shows he has opened fire with his machine gun’).
In his 1945 dictionary Partridge, who served in the RAF from 1942 to 1945, illuminated the origin of the word gen: ‘Not, as many suppose, from “genuine”. . . No; gen is from “for the general information of all ranks,” common to the three services.’ His other definitions explore various situations encountered by aircrew, such as becoming tangled in the soup (‘to be lost, or go astray, in a fog’) while flying over the ditch (‘the sea; especially the English Channel’), and having to footle around (‘to circle in search of a target’) while keeping clear of flaming onions (‘anti-aircraft tracer shells and/or bullets’), before letting loose their sack of taters (‘a loadful of bombs, delivered grocery-wise’) and hoping that they will arrive hang on! (‘All right! Correct! In Bomber Command: from a bomb dropped bang on (exactly on) the target.’) On returning safely to base, the logical course of action might well be to then get supercharged (‘in a drunken state’) as quickly as possible, also known as being completely shot up (‘very drunk’).