My Zumba teacher employed some World War I slang this morning as one of our dancers hurried out to work.
“Good luck in the trenches!”
The class all laughed, as did I, but my mind didn’t follow Becky out the door.
Instead, it hunkered down at the word and I marveled at how events from 100 years ago still live in our daily lives.
The trenches, of course, were where soldiers lived in inhuman conditions fighting a ghastly war.
The worst place to be with death on the line every single minute–snipers watching 24 hours a day for a helmet or face to peek over the top.
Speaking of “over the top,” that comes from WWI as well.
Funk holes
Webster’s defines it this way: “going beyond the expected, usual, normal, or appropriate.”
That surely is a description of climbing out of the relative safety of a trench to head across No-Man’s Land.
(No-man’s land, a description we use today of a place no one should visit).
Some of the slang and words surprise.
“Having a chat,” today means gathering for a conversation. In WWI slang it referred to small groups of trench soldiers examining each other and their clothing to kill the “chatt,” a Hindi word for parasite, in this context, lice.
And that word “sniper,” comes from the British Army discussions of sharpshooting.
A snipe, the bird, is the hardest one to hit, thus a sniper is someone with keen eyesight and skill to hit even the merest hint of a head peeking out of trench.
Non-dirigible air balloons, the “Tommie” soldiers also called them German sausages.
How about a “cushy” job?
British Army again, slang for “pleasure” from the Hindi.
Here on the west coast, we’ve got Ocean Villas.
According to Julian Walker in Trench Talk: Words of the First World War:
“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.”
Here are a few more with the root of their slang definitions:
A-1: The British War Office created an ABC system of classification for the Department of Recruiting. They graded each category on a scale of 1 to 3. A-1 men were fit for the army overseas.
Basket case: Devised by the Americans, it referred to men whose upper and lower limbs were blown off and had to be carried via a basket by other soldiers away from the field.
Crummy-–itchy from louse bites.
Dud: a shell that did not explode, thus anything of dubious value–something anticipated that did not go off.
Funk: Funk holes were excavated openings on the front walls of trenches where soldiers could retire when not on duty. You could understand why they might be in a funk, or depressed, while sitting in a mud hole waiting for the whistle calling them into battle.
Nose dive: A description of fighter pilots’ tactic of bearing down on the enemy from above.
Pushing up daisies: dead an buried. Soldiers had many euphemisms for death including “going west.”
French soldiers having a chat
Trip wire: With no man’s land cluttered with wires, soldiers carried wire cutters to pass. A trip wire set off a trap or an alarm.
Up Against the Wall: standing before a wall before a firing squad. Soldiers were executed for desertion or cowardice often during WWI.
Zero hour: the time of attack.
Tweetables
Having a chat–what does it really mean?– and other WWI slang Click to Tweet
Modern slang taken from WWI Click to Tweet
The WWI meaning of crummy Click to Tweet
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