#war words

[artist-x-j-roman-cain]

[goldthehardesthue]

The British took a similarly practical approach, using phrase books or parroting expressions. Anglicised versions of French words – compray for “do you understand”; napoo from il n’y en a plus and San Fairy Ann from ça ne fait rien, to name but a few — quickly entered trench vernacular. As professor Julie Coleman, author of A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries, points out, while British officers usually had passable French, further down, “soldiers got by with very limited French, often in mutilated forms”. "They picked up the odd word from the languages of other nations too," she adds, pointing to terms still recognised today, such as the Hindi cushy, meaning easy, or the Arabic bint meaning girlfriend or woman. And if few returned from the front fluent in a foreign tongue, trench chatter left its mark. Researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary are currently investigating terms they believe may have originated during the war, including “plonker”, initially used to describe the scream of Howitzer shells, and “skive” potentially from esquiver, the French for escape. “The war clearly had quite an impact on the vocabulary of the time,” says senior editor Kate Wild.

Fighting talk: how Tommies found a common language in the trenches by Jennifer Lipman (http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jun/28/first-world-war-one-soldiers-tommies-common-language-trenches)