Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  At this time Ernest Weekley was compiling his An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1921), not a book specifically of war slang, but one in which the war, and its language, has an overwhelming presence. Weekley’s citations show a lexicographer introducing new terminology, some of which would be classed as slang:

  Scrimshaw

  Also scrimshander. Cf. scrimshanker, shirker, of later appearance. Origin unknown.

  ‘It was the army that gave us “strafe” and “blighty” and “napoo” and “wind-up” and “scrimshanker” ’.

  Saturday Review Aug 11, 1917

  But Weekley was deeply affected by the war, selecting citations which indicate a lasting resentment against the recent enemy:

  Frazzle

  To unravel, etc

  ‘The Allies have to beat Germany to a frazzle’.

  Referee, May 27, 1917

  Napoo

  Regarded by Mr Atkins as a current French phrase closing a discussion in indefinite fashion. Fr il n’y en a plus. Cf. the German war word naplü, cognac.

  ‘Not the napoo victory ensuing from neutral pressure and semi-starvation, but the full decisive military victory’.168

  Pall Mall Gazette Feb 15, 1917

  Wartime terms began to appear in newly published dictionaries and glossaries, such as the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles fascicle Si-St and Su-Th (1919), which included a citation for ‘stunt’ from Blackwoods Magazine April 1916 – ‘You remember it is time to get up, for there is a “stunt on” ’; and ‘strafe’, which included a citation of a mother threatening to strafe her child, in acknowledgement of the processes by which the word had come from German to British soldiers, and then on to British civilians. Blackie produced a Compact Etymological Dictionary (1920) with an appendix of ‘Terms of Special Note in Modern Warfare’, and Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1923) included the words ‘napoo’, ‘to get the wind up’, ‘brass hats’ and ‘over the top’. Blackie’s Standard Dictionary (no date, but before 1925), had a section on ‘War Words and Words Recently Introduced’, which included ‘soixante-quinze’, ‘strafe’, ‘Tommy’, and ‘Taube’.

  The first post-war book specifically on army slang was Digger Dialects, by W. H. Downing (1919), Downing having served in Egypt and France. The book was published while he was a student, having returned to Australia, and is by no means limited to Australian-originated terms, its second part containing a passive Australian vocabulary of words encountered via British/Asian contacts, Papuan Pidgin, Russian and Italian. The work acquired major political importance in terms of the war’s underlining of Australia’s growing identity, to the extent that it provoked some criticism for its inclusion of terms originating outside Australia or the Anzac experience.169 Downing’s work provided about a third of the material that made up the Glossary of Slang and Peculiar Terms in Use in the A.I.F. (1921–4),170 compiled by librarians at the Australian War Memorial library.

  The compiling of Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases (1925) was carried out by Edward Fraser and John Gibbons at the behest of the Imperial War Museum, starting with an announcement in The Times in October 1921 that the journal Notes and Queries would be collecting material. A comment that some of the terms might not be ‘fit for polite conversation’ pointed the way for the sending in of terms that would reflect the language of the soldiers rather than that of readers of The Times. Sieveking, since his appointment as librarian of the Imperial War Museum had been working on forces slang, also collecting French and German army slang. His first article in Notes and Queries, on 29 October 1921, offered a discussion of slang as part of the development of language, a supporting statement for the idea of collecting slang from Henry Bradley, editor of the New English Dictionary (later the Oxford English Dictionary), a discussion of the words ‘poilu’ and ‘boche’, which showed many of the extensions shown above (see p. 95), and a glossary, made up from contributions by members of the staff of The Times, former soldiers all. A fortnight later the challenges appeared: ‘ “Base-wallah” can scarcely be described as of Hindu origin’, and ‘Acdum. From Hindustani Ek dam’, from H. Wilberforce-Bell; and ‘No 9 “An aperient pill”. Not slang but a definite compound in the Military Pharmacopoeia’;171 and ‘Scoff – This is omitted in the list – a very old Army term for “eating” ’, from ‘Constant Reader’.172 Sieveking offered another list the following week ‘compiled from words kindly supplied to us’ by five contributors, including Archibald Sparke. Further lists appeared on 10 December 1921, 7 January 1922 (specifically Russian, supplied by Lonsdale Deighton), and on 18 March 1922 (Indian words supplied by R. C. Temple and L. M. Anstey). This was followed by an article on ‘Wipers’ and the anglicisations of other Flemish and French place names, on 22 July 1922. The Notes and Queries correspondence seems to be more generous-spirited than the Athenaeum correspondence, which had been typified by statements such as Boyd Cable’s ‘I have just read in your current issue the article on “Slang in War-time”, and I am the more anxious to point out a number of inexact and incorrect statements because with the authority of such a journal behind them, they may in future years come to be accepted as authoritative and correct’,173 and ‘A.H.B.’s ‘ “Gadget” is not a war word’.174 If reactions were sharply worded, this may have been an indication of how much the subject mattered to people; by the time of the 1921/2 correspondence academics seem to have been more willing to accept other people’s views on usages and etymologies.

  Despite their obvious enthusiasm for the subject in their seminal work, these discussions on slang featured neither Edward Fraser, a military history writer, nor John Gibbons, who went on to write travel books, and for whom Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases was his first published work. Julie Coleman notes that ‘much of what is in this dictionary is official terminology rather than slang’, and that ‘this dictionary was based on written material, which would necessarily over-represent the language of more educated individuals’, which, together with the extensive sections on battle honours and regimental nicknames, leads to the view that the book was compiled more from a military than a linguistic viewpoint.175 But a sense of fun and irony is apparent in their definitions of ‘Mesop’ (Mesopotomia – also Mess-Up) and ‘doing savage rabbits’ (lying in wait), neither of which appear in Brophy and Partridge’s book.

  Eric Partridge served in Egypt, Gallipoli and France, returning to Australia to finish his studies, and eventually setting up the press which published Three Personal Accounts (1929), and in 1930 publishing with John Brophy, another ex-soldier, Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914–1918. The first sentence of its preface states that time was running out and that as time passed the songs would be more difficult than the slang to record and find. While acknowledging a debt to Fraser and Gibbons, their view was that their own work was different, specifically based on their personal experience as former soldiers, and deliberately trying to make a ‘record-by-glimpses of the British soldiers’ spirit and life.’176 For them Fraser and Gibbons’s ‘excellent compilation’ was ‘wider in scope … but written in less detail’. Looking back at the preface to Fraser and Gibbons’s work, their awareness of their own fallibility and the acknowledgement that it was ‘the only book on the subject published’ sits well with their hope that the book is ‘interesting and entertaining’ – noteworthy is the positioning opposite the title page of a Bairnsfather cartoon mocking GHQ messages about supplies. While Fraser and Gibbons state their first intention was to make ‘a Dictionary of War Slang at the instance of the authorities of the Imperial War Museum using materials contributed by officers and men’,177 for Brophy and Partridge this meant the book was written ‘from a more or less “official” standpoint’.178 Brophy and Partridge were equally insistent that their work had been made by ‘consulting men of different ranks and widely varying experience’,179 though their primary aim was to collect and publish songs before slang.

  Clearly before the end of the decade there had grown a sense that there w
as ‘good’ war slang and ‘bad’ war slang; the sense that certain terms might give offence, and should therefore be laid aside, may be considered an early form of ‘politically correct language’.

  In 1933 Partridge published Words! Words! Words!, a collection of previously published essays, including essays on ‘British Soldiers’ Slang with a Past’, ‘German Army Slang’, and ‘The Slang of the Poilu’, together with a new essay on the ‘Soldiers’ Slang of Three Nations’. The last of these iterates Partridge’s assessment that class mixing in the stress of the Front changes slang more than foreign influences do, despite foreign contributions being ‘very much more picturesque and interesting’. As he saw it, the winners in this were not the working classes, who acquired some grandiloquent and officialese phrases, but the educated classes, whose language, in danger of becoming ‘effete, pretty-pretty or wire-drawn’, became much more robust.180 The same year saw the publication of his Slang To-day and Yesterday, with sections on sailors’ slang and soldiers’ slang, where he discusses the 1922 doctoral dissertation of Hans Ehlers, Farbige Worte im England der Kriegszeit (Colourful Words in England during Wartime). For Partridge the difficulty with this work was that Ehlers had not distinguished sufficiently between ‘the jargon rife in the Press’ and soldiers’ slang,181 and that it raised the ghosts of the civilian vituperation of Germany and Germans in slang. Partridge quotes Collinson’s assurance to Ehlers that ‘the worst expressions he has gathered’ were moribund, a curious position given Partridge’s obvious enthusiasm for the subject. W. E. Collinson’s Contemporary English, A Personal Speech Record (1927), included a section on ‘War Words’ in which Collinson referred to material gathered by Ehlers: ‘My reading of his work was not unaccompanied with a certain amount of grim and bitter amusement at the merciless showing-up of some of the more distressing symptoms of that war-psychosis, which afflicted us …’.182 Collinson felt that some of the ‘most rabid’ terms had been lost or acquired a ‘playful or teasing significance’, terms such as ‘mad dog’, ‘mailed fist’, ‘frightfulness’, ‘steam-roller’, ‘somewhere in France’. Clearly before the end of the decade there had grown a sense that there was ‘good’ war slang and ‘bad’ war slang; the sense that certain terms might give offence, and should therefore be laid aside, may be considered an early form of ‘politically correct language’.

  The late 1930s saw continuing German interest in English war slang. Herbert Hiddeman’s doctoral thesis in 1938, Investigation into the Slang of the English Army in the World War, was a thorough exploration of expressions found in dictionaries such as Fraser and Gibbons, Brophy and Partridge, and in war memoirs and novels. Referencing the Athenaeum correspondence, Collinson, the Wipers Times and similar contemporary publications, it surveys the period’s language well, occasionally missing nuances that exist almost exclusively in the oral register: ‘Sweet F.A.’, for example, is given as the short form of ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’ without a mention that this was also the shortening of ‘sweet fuck all’.183

  Rolf Greifelt’s Der Slang des englischen Soldaten im Weltkrieg 1914–1918 (English Soldiers’ Slang in the 1914–18 World War), written as his doctoral dissertation in 1937, gives a view into how British (and some other English-speaking) soldiers’ slang was being recorded and analysed nearly a generation after the conflict. The work investigates the nature of slang, English soldiers’ slang and its position and meaning within slang generally, the methods of creating and the forms of spoken soldiers’ slang, the content and forms of words, the experience of war in speech, and the distinction between English, German and French soldiers’ speech. The final section contains some observations on the influence of soldiers’ slang on post-war English and an extensive glossary, in several sections. Greifelt’s work includes studies of rhyming slang and its shortenings – ‘china’ from ‘china plate’/‘mate’ – and back slang (he notes ‘Can’t Manage A Rifle’ for RAMC). He even nearly gets round the nonsense word ‘hoojamakloo’ (as ‘hooga ma kloo’), manages ‘oojiboo’, and his transcription of ‘skiboo, skiboo, skibumpity-bump-skibboo’ is impressive. In an echo of the trilingual wordplay of the war (n’y a plus/narpoo/naplü), Greifelt presents anglicisations of place names such as ‘Moo-Cow Farm’, ‘Arm in tears’ and ‘Ocean Villas’, and his inclusion of expressions such as ‘to tank up’ – sich volltanken (get drunk) and ‘Blind’ – Blindgänger (dud shell) show the close relation between the German and British mediations of the experience of the Front. Greifelt taught American English at Marburg and Heidelberg, before moving to Darmstadt. He died in March 1945.

  The year of the outbreak of the Second World War saw the publication of T. Werner Laurie’s The Soldier’s War Slang Dictionary. Laurie had published a Soldiers’ English-French Conversation Book in 1914, followed by a Soldiers’ English–German Conversation Book in 1915; the 1939 24-page glossary, possibly published with an eye to a new war creating a revival of interest in the subject, contained a larger proportion of Russian terms than most glossaries gave, and some rarer terms, such as ‘begnet’ (Scots for ‘bayonet’), ‘jimmy’ (a salute), and ‘hot-cross bun’ (Red Cross ambulance).

  The resurgence in the 1960s of interest in the conflict brought back to remembrance the rich and colourful language of 1914 to 1918. Robert Kee, writing in The Observer in 1965 on the re-issue of Brophy and Partridge’s The Long Trail – Soldiers’ Songs and Slang 1914–18 took issue with Brophy’s apparent prudishness, feeling that the senseless repetition of obscenity was one of the most dynamic aspects of military slang, and that the ‘surrealist use of obscenity’ brought a ‘near-poetic value’ to the language.184 But the appreciation of ‘napoo’ and ‘squiffy’ as ‘as nostalgic as any book of photographs’ – historically evocative, as was the use of such words in Joan Littlewood’s theatre production Oh! What a Lovely War (1963) – recreated the language, as authentic, for a third generation (though the First World War song was titled ‘Oh! It’s a Lovely War’). The contrast between Brophy’s attitude towards obscenity, rooted in the distance between the language of the home and that of the Front, and Kee’s 1960s enthusiasm for swearing serves as another indicator of successive generations’ differing viewpoints and uses of the material. For Collinson some of it was an embarrassment, for Brophy also, but for different reasons, while for Kee it was how history could be made to come to life. For ‘Through German Spectacles’, the regular wartime column heading of the Daily Express, read ‘Through Changes of Spectacles’. The following decade brought Fussell’s seminal study of the war, the language of literature, and its lasting effect on the twentieth century, and Jonathan Lighter’s collection of American slang from the war, The Slang of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe 1917–1919 (1972). Described by Jonathon Green as ‘the outstanding example of its kind’185 this glossary was drawn from a wide range of sources, its harshness matching the cynicism of the Vietnam period. Dan Todman’s discussion of the possible ‘end of relevance’ of the war, published in 2004, missed how anniversaries create both marketing opportunities and opportunities to re-examine convenient if arbitrary blocks of history. Anniversaries do, by the power of a number, concertina time, and the run up to 2014 produced a massive resurgence in family history research and shelfloads of books on the war, including studies of the English language during the conflict, alone and in combination with other languages, and, tellingly, in comparison with the English language as used by the British Army in Afghanistan.186

  Then and now

  A bundle of pens and pencils sits in a beaker on the desk; the beaker was made ‘to commemorate PEACE – The Great European War – 1914–1919’. At the time of its most recent purchase, for it had probably gone through several hands before it arrived here in 2013, website-compilers were discussing whether to use the form ‘First World War’, or ‘World War One’. Though the first form was in use from September 1914, there would be a difference in meaning depending whether the stress was on ‘First’ or ‘World’; stress on the first word would emphasise an or
der, on the second would emphasise the extent of the fighting. The form ‘World War One’ appeared when it was clear there would be a World War Two, Brophy stating that while it was happening it was ‘the war’.187 Though it is not difficult to find references to the war as a ‘great war’, the conflict was being described in the press as ‘The Great War’ by early September 1914.188

  Paul Fussell listed in The Great War and Modern Memory a number of ways in which the war lived on – pub closing hours, cigarette-smoking, distrust of the press, wrist-watches,189 but also noted how the re-use of First World War terms in the Second World War gave the impression of ‘one Great War running from 1914 to 1945’.190 He begins the final section, ‘Survivals’, of the chapter ‘Oh What a Literary War’ with the proposal that ‘nobody alive during the war, whether a combatant or not, ever got over its special diction and system of metaphor’;191 the persistence of ironical wordplay, the sense that officialdom mocks itself through its own language use, the idea that persistent use of taboo words could shift them into the mainstream, would argue that certain facets of wartime language, and changes brought about as a result of the First World War have anchored themselves into English language usage. But the origin of these usages should be contextualised in a language which now sounds in many ways different from present English. The point can be derived from another observation by Fussell, the use of ‘quite’ as an intensifier in the Field Service Postcard statement, ‘I am quite well’; for Fussell this is ‘egregious’, a use of ‘quite’ which in the early twenty-first century seems odd: an advertisement which promotes Four Crown Whisky as ‘quite good’192 looks absurd now, but shows that the phrase ‘I am quite well’, appearing on countless soldiers’ postcards home, is more enthusiastic than it now appears.