Out of the trenches of the First World War, an altered language emerged. English still bears the scars of the war, in words that entered its vocabulary at the time. On the centenary of the war, the Oxford English Dictionary has appealed to the public to help trace when certain words were first used. A soldier’s letter home, a long-forgotten journal, could reveal the birth of a word.
The First World War, with its staggering death toll and its use of technology, meant a violent rupture from the past. So much was new about the conflict that new words had to be found to speak of it, and of the grim modernity that it brought in. Soldiers suffered from “shell shock” and wore “camouflage”. The trenches gave rise to a whole register of experience — people could now go “over the top”, wear “trench coats” or talk about “salient” points. There are other ways in which the war changed language. People from various social classes and from different countries were thrown together in the army. So words used by one group — for instance, “chum”, a favourite of the criminal underworld, or “bloke”, a working-class word for gentleman — entered wider usage. Foreign words became part of English, including those used by Indian soldiers. “Blighty”, meaning Britain, which came from the Hindi “bilati”, and “cushy”, a derivative of “khushi”. It helped that the war was fought largely by a citizen army, which disbanded and took the new language home.
