Words and The First World War
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Towards the end of the war there was an awareness that unless some methodical collecting was put in place there was a possibility that the wealth of war terminology and slang would be lost. E. B. Osborn’s article in the Illustrated London News 25 September 1918, ‘War and the Word-maker’ proposed that some words would remain in the language as a memorial to the conflict – which, given how quickly the most typical ones disappeared, was clearly not the case. In November 1918 Archibald Sparke started a correspondence on war slang in Notes and Queries, which went on until March 1919, and started again in 1922; Ernest Baker initiated a correspondence in The Athenaeum in May 1919 which went on until December, and A. Forbes Sieveking put together a list of terms from former soldiers working for The Times, which was published in Notes and Queries in October 1921, and laid emphasis on the need for ‘collection and classification of the slang produced by the war, and its historical and philological relations to that of previous periods’.60 December 1921 saw an article in the National Review by Edgar Preston, commenting on Sieveking’s project and noting that both French and Italian lexicographers were making collections of war slang.61 In the autumn of 1921 the Imperial War Museum put out a call ‘to old Army men for lists of slang phrases which were used in the trenches’;62 in this the museum was seen to be reacting to collections of French and German war terms, which had been published before the end of the war, such as Albert Dauzat’s L’Argot de la Guerre (1918) and Karl Bergmann’s Wie Der Feldgraue Spricht (1916). Edward Fraser and John Gibbons, authors of Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases (1925), were catholic in their collecting, incorporating several pre-war expressions which had been ‘either adopted as they stood … or altered and adapted to suit existing circumstances’; they also acknowledged that their collection was not definitive, and invited further contributions, in itself an acceptance that the language of the war was still, in 1925, fresh in the minds and mouths of their readers. John Brophy included in his anthology, The Soldier’s War (1929), a glossary on the grounds that 1914–18 was already beginning to take on ‘a “period” flavour’, and before long ‘the book may be unintelligible without this glossary’.63 The following year he collaborated with Eric Partridge in Songs and Slang of the British Soldier (1930). Songs and Slang of the British Soldier went through three editions between 1930 and 1967, picking up an addition to the title – The Long Trail – Soldiers’ Songs and Slang 1914–18; each new edition built on the previous with contributions from readers ‘whose wartime memories were then comparatively fresh and unconfused’.64 After the first edition Eric Partridge went on to present several collections of soldier slang in The Quarterly Review (1931), in A Martial Medley (1931), and Word! Words! Words! (1933), and in E. B. Swinton’s Twenty Years After (1936–38).
In September 1939 another British Expeditionary Force was in France, and an article in the Derby Daily Telegraph 25 September (p. 6) reported that ‘it is just as if the clock had stopped for 21 years and had now been restarted. As then, so now: “pain”, “oeufs”, “coffee-or-lay”, “no bon”, “tray bon”, and “encore” still make up the average soldier’s vocabulary’.65 Not just a repeat of the vocabulary, but also of the reporting of it.
Fighting over words
Language functioned both as a weapon, as a field of conflict and as a trophy. The appropriation of any German expressions, particularly those like ‘hate’ and ‘the day’ which were effectively propaganda terms, showed the British making fun of German earnestness. ‘Hate’, deriving from Lissauer’s Hymn of Hate (see p. 207) was adopted to mean the dawn and dusk artillery or infantry shooting; ‘Germany’s place in the sun’ featured in Von Bülow’s speech in 1898 in regard to Germany’s intention to be part of the colonial process – ‘In short, we do not want to put anyone in our shadow, but we also demand our place in the sun’ – and was regularly mocked, as in ‘Australia’s place in the sun’66 and ‘French take German Congo. Another Place in the Sun Lost’.67 ‘Der Tag’ (the day) symbolised the day when Germany would successfully challenge the world; it was the subject of a pastiche poem in The Gasper,68 as well as of a patriotic play by J. M. Barrie, and was mocked by an officer recorded in Malins’ How I Filmed the War (1920) – ‘My word, we haven’t heard a blessed thing for days. Have you really come to photograph “The Day”?’69 ‘Kamerad’, the surrendering soldier’s plea, was taken over to mean ‘to surrender’, ‘a surrendering soldier’ and later as a verb meaning ‘to kill prisoners’,70 ‘strafe’ was taken over so successfully that the New English Dictionary (1919) gave a citation of a mother saying to her child ‘Wait till I git ‘old of yer, I’ll strarfe yer, I will!’ The recorded words of an Austro-Hungarian officer taken prisoner on the Italian Front show that ‘strafe’ had made the return journey, as he ‘exclaimed in surprise: “Engleese! Bang! Bang! Some Strafe!” ’71 ‘Ersatz’ changed from its meaning as ‘replacement’ (Ersatzbataillon) to ‘cheap substitute’ or ‘poor’ as in the Daily Express headline ‘Ersatz Oratory’ on 26 September 1918, or the post-war ‘German “ersatz” system’ of clothing, which the Manchester Guardian reported as involving ‘paper shirts and collars’.72
Fraser and Gibbons imply that to a certain extent there was also a process of appropriation by the military of terms used by the press – ‘frightfulness’ certainly, and ‘steam-roller’, which the press invented as a term to describe the size and power of the Russian army, but which Fraser and Gibbons claim was ‘taken by the Services and used in a derogatory sense’. Despite the moral condemnation inherent in Churchill’s use of the term ‘baby-killers’ to describe the German fleet’s bombardment of towns on the east coast of England, H. M. Denham felt able to describe the action of his ship in firing at a farm in the Dardanelles as ‘real “baby-killing” ’.73
In studying the record of language during the conflict it is noticeable that considerably less attention was paid to language in the Navy and the Air Force. Fewer words moved from the naval experience to the Home Front and to the Army, though naval glossaries were printed in the press. Possible reasons are the lower numbers of personnel involved, their having less contact with the civilian population, and the traditional way that naval staff tended to live in or near port towns. Much naval terminology or slang, some of it very old,74 stayed within the Navy, e.g. ‘bracketing’ for range-finding by firing; ‘bloke’ for captain; ‘neaters’ for rum; ‘ord’ for Ordinary Seaman’; ‘snottie’ for midshipman; or indicated exclusion of the non-naval world, e.g. ‘soldier’ for an incompetent sailor – a ‘soldier’s wind’ was, according to Fraser and Gibbons, an easy wind that anyone could sail in. In a sample from Fraser and Gibbons comprising 25 per cent of the whole (pp. 90–170, ‘ever since Adam was an oakum boy’ to ‘Ally Sloper’s Cavalry’) there are 696 entries, of which seventy-one are specified as naval and twenty-two as air force terms. Few naval terms have survived to the present in general speech: among them are ‘sweet Fanny Adams’, ‘a flap’, ‘a gadget’, ‘show a leg’, and ‘do you want jam on it?’, of which only ‘a flap’ originated during the war, as one of three stages of getting ready quickly – a buzz, a flap, and a panic75 – and most of them are seldom documented (for example ‘gashions’, meaning ‘an excess of anything’, ‘Jimmy the One’, denoting ‘the First Lieutenant on board ship’ and ‘Monkey’s Island’, meaning ‘the upper bridge of a warship’). In contrast to army slang, a few terms from naval slang entered common civilian speech without being recognised as such – ‘pongo’ for soldier, ‘pond’ for sea – while others were taken up by soldiers and after 1918 were more thought of as soldiers’ terms: ‘bully-beef’, ‘gadget’, ‘jam on it’, ‘flag-wagging’.76 ‘Erk’, originally a below decks term for a navy rating, was taken up by the air force as slang for a mechanic, and was retained into the Second World War. Given the horrific nature of actual sea-warfare it is strange that fewer imaginative or cynical terms were documented: ‘survivor’s leave’ was the term used by a sailor to describe his time ashore after being torpedoed.77 In four w
artime newspaper articles on Naval slang78 only the last gives terms which were specific to the experience of the war – ‘hostilities’ for men who signed up for the duration, and ‘distasters’ for Royal Naval Divisions. Boyd Cable, a soldier-writer, used the term ‘jaunties’ to describe the Royal Naval Brigade, as recorded by Eric Partridge in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, but he stated that he had not seen it anywhere other than in Cable’s The Old Contemptibles (1919). While much slang was shared between the army and the air force – ‘sausages’, ‘archie’, ‘wind up’ (and Boyd Cable, an infantryman, was probably the first to use in print the term ‘dog-fight’ for what had previously been an ‘air fight’ or ‘air duel’)79 – airmen quickly developed their own slang: ‘the British airman is an adept at inventing slang terms’, wrote the Birmingham Gazette, 20 August 1918 (p. 2). Partridge noted in his Dictionary of R.A.F. Slang (1945) that the Second World War RAF was still using a few words from the period 1914 to 1918, but ‘only or mainly by the men over forty or in new senses’; but in comparing the slangs of the three forces he noted that ‘the richest of all is that of the Army … the Navy’s slang, not quite so extensive as that of the Army … [and] the Air Force had a small body of slang’.80 A lot of RFC and RAF slang and particularly American air force slang was imaginative, cynical and long-lasting, though less disseminated to the civilian press at the time. Ernest Baker, initiating the correspondence on slang in The Athenaeum,81 mentioned a few terms of ‘what may be called “air-lingo” ’ – ‘bank’ (to shell), ‘zoom’, ‘huff’ (kill), and ‘hickboo’ (air-raid), with the pre-war ‘bus’ for plane; elsewhere in the correspondence only Eric Verney82 mentioned ‘interesting Air-Force slang’, specifically ‘quirk’ and ‘spike-bozzle’ (‘quirk’ was an inexperienced airman, and ‘spike-bozzle’ meant to destroy completely), as well as ‘bus’, ‘drome’ and ‘joy-stick’. Fraser and Gibbons dedicated considerable space to air force slang, with terms such as ‘conked out’, ‘comic business’, ‘tabloid’ (a Sopwith plane with many good points, so concentrated goodness), ‘parasol’ (a monoplane, with wings above the pilot), many of which were taken up by Brophy and Partridge; but in his Slang To-day and Yesterday Partridge dedicated less than half a page to RAF slang.83
STRAFE
‘Strafe’ was acquired from the widely used German motto Gott strafe England (God punish England). England (Britain), and later Italy, were to be punished for entering the war against Germany and Austro-Hungary as an act of will rather than self-defence, Britain specifically having made it a ‘world war’ through bringing in its colonies. The German expression was used within the territory of the Central Powers as graffiti, as a franking motto on correspondence, as a legend on badges, and on a wide range of inventively designed charity stamps. The adoption of ‘strafe’ by anglophone troops and later civilians downgraded its force, as it came to be associated with annoyance rather than fear; the change of meaning in the process of adoption was an act of conquest in itself.
FIGURE 2.4 Two German ‘poster’ stamps; a German postcard sent in November 1917; a British postcard indicating the downgrading of the word ‘strafe’.
FIGURE 2.4 Continued
The sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 sparked riots in several British cities, in which shops with German owners’ signs were targeted. German philology was around the same time directed at English, with an article by a Professor Neumann on the decline of English: on 1 May 1915 the Daily Chronicle84 reported ‘Language of Britons Decaying – Dutch [sic] View of English Working Classes’. The article, based on a report in the Frankfurter Zeitung, comments on Professor Neumann’s view ‘that the language, despite its increasing use in all parts of the Far East’, is showing ‘marked indications, not only of phonetic decay, but of decay in the capacity of the language to express ideas’. Professor Neumann’s ideas seemed to be largely based on the observation of migrant communities in America retaining their first languages, but also on observation that in India and China ‘the language has become drugged with exotic terms’, with ‘thousands of forms in use which are not English, and which are pressing on pure English with disastrous results.’ Examples of ‘insidious interlopers’ given are ‘Pagoda, monsoon, verandah, shawl’. Some of this may have been influenced by the mood of lexical purism proposed by the populist German Language Union (Allgemeine Deutscher Sprachverein, ADSV), founded in 1885, which campaigned against adoptions of French and Greco-Latin-based vocabulary and words from English. Professor Neumann was naturally patronised in the Daily Chronicle article – ‘like so many of his kind he is most amusing when most serious’ – but German philology was itself later obliquely mocked in an article in the Globe (24 May 1918): ‘With your admirable command of foreign idioms you very possibly know our cant London phrase: “Where Maggie wore the beads.” Well, Fritz dear, that is where you are going to get it.’ This quote was pointedly used by Ernest Weekleyin his 1921 An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, despite Weekley’s being Professor of Modern Languages at Nottingham University at the time. But there were voices that complained about the use of foreign terms in English; ‘hamburgers’ might be relabelled as ‘Salisbury steaks’, and Horatio Bottomley proposed that the Prince of Wales should drop his motto Ich dien on the grounds that it was ‘in the hateful language of the Hun’.85 But under the headline – Wanted: Reduced Language Rations, the Yorkshire Evening Post ran a brief article on 5 February 1917:
Criticising the language of Lord Devonport’s appeal for voluntary rationing, ‘The Londoner’ in the ‘Evening News’ observes: All that he says is in an official jargon of Latin English: none of it is in the language that we simple folk talk and understand. Listen to this. The Controller wants to say that poor people eat more bread than fresh meat. What he says is that ‘With many in such circumstances meat is only intermittently comprised in the scale of dietary.’ What a jargon! I should like to hear how a Controller would describe a lost brown leather purse.86
The complaint is explicitly against Latin English, but seeks to maintain this position without explicitly favouring Germanic English. On 1 September 1917 the same newspaper ran the following:
Is the English Language Vulgarised?
Mr George Moore’s Strong Views
Mr George Moore, the author, holds that the English language is becoming hopelessly vulgarised and barbarised.
‘People won’t take the trouble to speak or write ordinary, decent English,’ he told Mr. Arthur Machen [of the ‘Angels of Mons’ fame], of the London ‘Evening News’. ‘Why do people write “terrain”, “badinage”, “point d’appui”? Then we had a very good phrase, curtain fire. That has become “barrage”. We used to speak of a smoke curtain, which is excellent; now we speak of a “smoke barrage”, which is nonsense. We are getting away from the idioms of our own language. The other day I saw “esprit de factory” in an evening newspaper. And why do the people one meets at lunch talk about “gaffe” and “raffine”? It isn’t that they speak French; no, but they seem unable to speak English.’
‘You see English has lost so much already. It has lost “thee” and “thou”. It has lost such words as “hither”, “whither”, “thither”, “whence”, “yonder”. People don’t say “Whither are you going?” but “Where are you going?” Instead of “yonder” they use “over there” ’87
The argument was getting hopelessly muddled as nationalism pushed rational thinking aside. As the Athenaeum correspondence came to an end in December 1919 it was followed by a letter from Andrew de Ternant reminding readers that a short time previously there had been ‘agitation against the use and for the removal of Hun (or rather German) names of places in England’.88 Fortunately this had come to nothing, but there had been attempts to downgrade the status of ‘enemy languages’ in various ways. As early as October 1914 a journalist in The Cheltenham Looker-On was proposing that the study of German in schools should be dropped in favour of Spanish or Italian, as ‘the German is characteristic of the German race, and we
feel we do not want to be reminded of the existence of that race’,89 and James Crichton-Browne, a pioneer in the field of mental illness who had supplied research material to Darwin, believed that a proposal in 1917 to establish a chair of German language and Literature at the University of Edinburgh was ‘inopportune, unpatriotic and discreditable’.90 Meanwhile, a report in the Liverpool Daily Post stated that the Frankfurter Zeitung was calling on German citizens to ‘root out the language of our enemies from public signs and notices’,91 and the Austrian authorities in Trent, Trieste and Zara banned the use of Italian in public notices, street signs and newspapers.92 A proposal by the ‘German Clerks’ Association’ printed in the Hamburger Fremdenblatt observed that the pursuance of foreign trade in English had ‘helped the English to extend their position in the world’. By demanding that German foreign trade be carried on in German ‘we can damage the English enormously, because the greater part of their usurped importance in the world would collapse’.93
This aspect of the conflict extended over all the theatres of war. Pidgin was in use in the Allied takeover of German possessions in the South Pacific in 1914,94 and was parodied in the expression for a young officer – ‘makee learn’. In 1916 it emerged that linguists in Berlin had attempted to create a dialect to oust English-pidgin for use in territories controlled by Germany; this attempt was unsuccessful, and no doubt galling to the German officers who ‘had to communicate with the natives, and even give orders to their own troops, in pidgin-English’.95