Trench talk: a guide to first world war slang

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jul/23/first-world-war-slang-glossary

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The first world war was a surprisingly fertile period for the English language. People discussed language, collected slang, and argued about the origins of words and phrases. Newspapers printed slang glossaries and offered their own suggestions, not often accepted gratefully by troops at the front.

By the end of the war some terms that in 1914 had been regarded as criminal or service slang were being used in middle-class drawing rooms. In August 1918, the Guardian reported on the surprising use of terms such as "wangle it" and "wads of it [money]" in a debate in the House of Commons.

The structure of the army at the front influenced this, particularly in the close bonds between public-school-educated junior officers and the men, and the mixing of men from different areas after the introduction of conscription in 1916. The following glossary explains the meaning of some of the more common trench slang.

No man's land

The term that more than any other suggests the western front; used centuries earlier to describe a place of execution outside the walls of London, as a description of the space between lines of opposing trenches the term was already in use in 1907.

Jack Johnson

The black American heavyweight champion boxer's name was applied at first to the dark smoke given off by a particular large German shell, and later to the shell itself.

Lie-factory

A term applied from September 1914 to German propaganda. As new slang appeared on the home front, or in the trenches, the Rev Andrew Clark collected it in a series of notebooks now held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

PBI

The poor bloody infantry referred to themselves as "something to hang things on" as an infantryman's pack and equipment might come to half the soldier's own bodyweight.

Bombardier Fritz

Widely available behind the lines in estaminets (cafés selling alcohol and food), pommes de terre frites – chips – were turned into this caricature of the German soldier.

Dekko

As in "take a dekko at this" (take a look at this). From the Hindi word dekho meaning "look", one of a number of terms brought from India by British troops and gradually disseminated through the British army. On 20 March 1915 the Birmingham Daily Mail wrote that "The wars of the past have invariably coloured the language of returned soldiers, and this worldwide war will be no exception to the rule."

Iron rations

Emergency rations consisted of a tin of bully beef, very hard biscuits and a tin of tea and sugar. The term was also used for enemy shellfire.

Whizz-bang

Soldiers in the trenches learned to identify shells by size, effects or sound. Whizz-bangs were fired from high-velocity guns and gave you no time to duck; soldiers also used the term for a hastily written and despatched official postcards.

Blimp

Non-dirigible airships, also called sausages. A Canadian trench magazine in 1916 reported wonderfully on sausages dropping "assorted coal-boxes and whizz-bangs".

Mesopolonica

Troops sent to the Balkans or the Middle East often did not have a good idea of where they were. This mixture of Thessalonica and Mesopotamia has an air of resigned humour typical of trench slang.

Scarper

Many terms in use locally before 1914 gained wider currency as a result of the war. Scarper, meaning to run away, developed from the Italian escarpare in the nineteenth century, but after the German fleet was scuppered in Scapa Flow it was reinvigorated.

Cushy

Cushy came from the Hindi word khush meaning "pleasure". There were cushy billets, cushy jobs, even cushy trenches, where shelling and attacks were sporadic.

Blighty

From the Urdu word bilayati meaning "foreign", applied to British troops in India, this came to mean British, and then Britain. One of the great hopes for a British soldier was "a blighty one", a wound that was disabling, but not disastrous, which would send the wounded man home for good.

Copping a packet

The horrendous nature of death in industrialised conflict was reflected, possibly in an attempt to cope with it, by numerous creative ways of avoiding saying "killed": for example, becoming a landowner, going home, being buzzed or huffed, drawing your full issue, being topped off, or clicking it.

The bags

A term commonly used for the sandbags that constituted the top of the front wall of a trench. Attacks began with "going over the bags" or "hopping over the bags".

Flag-wagger

Navy slang from at least 1915, this term for a signaller is typical of the friendly disparaging of other servicemen's jobs.

Taube

A German monoplane of pre-war design, the Taube (pigeon) was withdrawn from service in early 1915, but not before its name was adopted by British soldiers and applied to any German plane.

Fanny Durack

Australian slang was the most cynically witty of the lot; when shelling caused the statue of the Virgin on top of the church at Albert to lean below the horizontal it was renamed after the Australian champion diver.

In the pink

A phrase that had been around for centuries, this appears regularly in soldiers' letters and postcards; improbable given the living conditions at the front, but reassuring for those at home to hear their loved ones were in good health.

Narpoo (or 'napoo')

From the French il n'y a plus, meaning "none left", this phrase was one of the most familiar of the war, used to indicate a sense of failure or mediocrity, "finished" or even "dead". It could close a conversation in any indefinite way, or describe the way the Allies feared the war might end. For German soldiers a naplü was a beer, and a naplüchen a cognac – clearly alcohol was in short supply on that side of the Front.

Ocean Villas

Mangling French place-names was surely one of the most creative forms of language to come out of the conflict. Auchonvillers became Ocean Villas, Mouquet Farm became Moo Cow Farm, Ploegsteert became Plug Street, and Ypres became the famous Wipers.

Julian Walker is the author, with Peter Doyle, of Trench Talk: Words of the First World War (History Press).