Made In America - Bill Bryson [190]
A final, incidental linguistic legacy of the war between the states was the term sideburns, named for the Union commander Ambrose E. Burnside, whose distinctive mutton-chop whiskers inspired a fashion and became known as burnsides. Within a decade the syllables had been transposed, but quite how or why is anyone’s guess.
After its brief flurry of creativity during the Civil War, military terminology then grows quiet for nearly half a century. Roughriders, from the Spanish-American War, limey for a British sailor, and leathernecks for Marines (so called because for a decade in the late nineteenth century they wore a uniform with a leather lining in the collar; it was said to be excruciatingly uncomfortable)23 effectively exhaust the list of neologisms from the period 1870-1917.
But the outbreak of global hostilities with World War I prompted an outpouring of new terms, many of which are with us yet. Among the words or expressions that entered the common argot during the period are dog tags, chowhound and chowtime, convoy, dawn patrol, dogfight, eyewash, to go west (actually much older, but not widely used before about 1918), stunt, shellshock, gadget, to scrounge, booby trap, foxhole, brass hat, MP for military police, civvies for civilian clothes, draftee, pipe down as a call for quiet (it originated in the nautical use of pipes to announce changes of watch and the like) and to swing the lead.24
From the British came bridgehead, ack-ack, blimp, tank and, rather unexpectedly, basket case for a severely wounded combatant. Blimp arose from its official designation: ‘Dirigible: Type B-Limp’, and ack-ack was a slang shortening of anti-aircraft, based on British telephonic code for the letters AA.
From the Germans came zeppelin (named for Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, its designer), black market (from German Schwarzmarkt) and Big Bertha for an outsized gun. As was their custom, the Germans had named the gun after the wife of the head of Krupp Steel, the manufacturer, and with a certain lack of delicacy had called it not Big Bertha but Fat Bertha. Quite how Frau Krupp received this signal honour is not known.
From France, meanwhile, came parachute, camouflage (rather oddly from camouflet, meaning ‘to blow smoke up someone’s nose’, a pastime that appears on the linguistic evidence to be specific to the French) and barrage (from tir de barrage) in the sense of concentrated artillery fire. Barrage already existed in English with the meaning of a barrier across a waterway, but previously had been pronounced to rhyme with disparage.25
Somewhat surprisingly, World War II was considerably less prolific of new terminology than World War I once you strip out those terms like Lend Lease, VE Day and Luftwaffe that are now used primarily in a historical context. Among the relatively few terms to come to prominence during the period and to live on after the war were bazooka, blackout, GI, liberty for shore leave, pin-up girl, Mae West for an inflatable jacket, task force, jeep, blitzkrieg, flak, fascism, gestapo, kamikaze, displaced person, blockbuster (originally a bomb sufficiently powerful to destroy an entire city block, and later of course appropriated by the entertainment industry), the expression the greatest thing since sliced bread and, not least, a robust and inventive use of the word fuck. One of the last named’s offshoots is snafu, often said to be an abbreviation of ‘situation normal,