From The Times: November 1, 1921
The Imperial War Museum is to form a collection of the slang words used by the English Army during the Great War, and the current Notes and Queries journal has a first list of words from contributions sent in by staff who served in the war. There is a preface on slang in general, and war slang in particular, by Mr Forbes Sieveking, Librarian of the Imperial War Museum, who will classify the words brought to his notice. Of the words printed this week many are familiar; others may be new, even to seasoned campaigners; others, again, were not entirely unknown before the war, though their introduction into camp and battalion may have given them a new lease of life. But one naturally asks how many of these words, now so easily recalled, are likely to endure. Judging by the present lists, only a few seem likely to pass into the language; many probably perished at once with the cessation of the circumstances which created them. On the whole, it would seem as if the Great War, though highly provocative of a new and expressive vocabulary, has not permanently enriched the language. Slang, indeed, in the sense in which we are now using it, does not find its way so quickly as might be supposed into literary currency. It is not to be confused with the many foreign words, first resented then adopted, which have become acclimatized in English. But we look almost in vain for this type here. “Camouflage” has probably come to stay, but it is not slang of the same kind as “coal-box”, “whizz-bang” or “funk-hole.” But it is because so much war slang is already obsolete that it is worth while to record it. The war was a great creative force; it threw up a multitude of new ways of expressing thought. By letting us see, perhaps for the first time on a great scale, language in the making, the war may shed light on some of the obscurest problems of philology. Why is anything named as it is? The most primitive speaker must have had a reason for calling such and such an object by such and such a name. A new thing may have reminded him, for naming purposes, of something familiar. If analogy was a process on which he worked, the same principle may have operated among English civilians when they were confronted with the new emotions and fresh experiences of military life.
FROM THE ARCHIVE