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Trench talk: a guide to first world war slang During the first world war, troops fighting in the trenches used slang to communicate. Here's a guide to its meaning
•The first world war was a surprisingly fertile period for the English language. People discussed language, collected slang, and argued about the origins of words and phrases. Newspapers printed slang glossaries and offered their own suggestions, not often accepted gratefully by troops at the front. • By the end of the war some terms that in 1914 had been regarded as criminal or service slang were being used in middle-class drawing rooms. In August 1918, the Guardian reported on the surprising use of terms such as "wangle it" and "wads of it [money]" in a debate in the House of Commons. •The structure of the army at the front influenced this, particularly in the close bonds between public-schooleducated junior officers and the men, and the mixing of men from different areas after the introduction of conscription in 1916. The following glossary explains the meaning of some of the more common trench slang
No man's land
• The term that more than any other suggests the western front; used centuries earlier to describe a place of execution outside the walls of London, as a description of the space between lines of opposing trenches the term was already in use in 1907.
• A British soldier keeps watch on 'no man's land' as his comrades sleep in a captured German trench at Ovillers, near Albert, during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
Jack Johnson • The black American heavyweight champion boxer's name was applied at first to describe the impact of a heavy, black German 15-cm artillery shell( to the dark smoke given off by a particular large German shell), and later to the shell itself.
Lie-factory A term applied from September 1914 to German propaganda. As new slang appeared on the home front, or in the trenches, the Rev Andrew Clark collected it in a series of notebooks now held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
PBI
•
The Poor Bloody Infantry referred to themselves as "something to hang things on" as an infantryman's pack and equipment might come to half the soldier's own bodyweight.
Dekko As in "take a dekko at this" (take a look at this). From the Hindi word dekho meaning "look", one of a number of terms brought from India by British troops and gradually disseminated through the British army. On 20 March 1915 the Birmingham Daily Mail wrote that "The wars of the past have invariably coloured the language of returned soldiers, and this worldwide war will be no exception to the rule."
Bombardier Fritz Available behind the lines in French bars were ‘Bombardier Fritz’ (pommes de terre frites – chips) with ‘oofs’ and ‘pang’, and ‘plonk’ (vin blanc – white wine). Widely available behind the lines in estaminets (cafés selling alcohol and food), pommes de terre frites – chips – were turned into this caricature of the German soldier.
Iron rations • Emergency rations consisted of a tin of bully beef, very hard biscuits and a tin of tea and sugar. The term was also used for enemy shellfire.
Whizz-bang
Soldiers in the trenches learned to identify shells by size, effects or sound. Whizz-bangs were fired from high-velocity guns and gave you no time to duck; soldiers also used the term for a hastily written and despatched official postcards
Blimp
Non-dirigible airships, also called sausages. A Canadian trench magazine in 1916 reported wonderfully on sausages dropping "assorted coal-boxes and whizz-bangs".
Mesopolonica Troops sent to the Balkans or the Middle East often did not have a good idea of where they were. This mixture of Thessalonica and Mesopotamia has an air of resigned humour typical of trench slang
Scarper The cruisers Emden, Frankfurt and Bremse entering Scapa Flow
• Many terms in use locally before 1914 gained wider currency as a result of the war. Scarper, meaning to run away, developed from the Italian escarpare in the nineteenth century, but after the German fleet was scuppered in Scapa Flow it was reinvigorated.
Cushy Cushy came from the Hindi word khush meaning "pleasure". There were cushy billets, cushy jobs, even cushy trenches, where shelling and attacks were sporadic.
Copping a packet
( To be severely wounded) The horrendous nature of death in industrialised conflict was reflected, possibly in an attempt to cope with it, by numerous creative ways of avoiding saying "killed": for example, becoming a landowner, going home, being buzzed or huffed, drawing your full issue, being topped off, or clicking it.
Blighty From the Urdu word bilayati meaning "foreign", applied to British troops in India, this came to mean British, and then Britain. One of the great hopes for a British soldier was "a blighty one", a wound that was disabling, but not disastrous, which would send the wounded art: man home for good
A World War I example of trench a shell case engraved with a picture of two wounded Tommies nearing theWhite Cliffs of Dover with the inscription "BLIGHTY!"
The bags A term commonly used for the sandbags that constituted the top of the front wall of a trench. Attacks began with "going over the bags" or "hopping over the bags".
Flag-wagger Here is a party of “ flagwaggers “in training at Wandsworth during 1914.
• Navy slang from at least 1915, this term for a signaller is typical of the friendly disparaging of other servicemen's jobs.
Taube
A German monoplane of pre-war design, the Taube (pigeon) was withdrawn from service in early 1915, but not before its name was adopted by British soldiers and applied to any German plane.
Fanny Durack During World War I, the statue of Mary and the infant Jesus on top of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Brebières in Albert, Somme, France, was hit by a shell on January 15, 1915, and slumped to a near-horizontal position. Australian troops nicknamed the leaning statue "Fanny", in honour of Fanny Durack as it resembled the swimmer diving off the blocks.
In the pink
A phrase that had been around for centuries, this appears regularly in soldiers' letters and postcards; improbable given the living conditions at the front, but reassuring for those at home to hear their loved ones were in good health.
Narpoo (or 'napoo')
From the French il n'y a plus, meaning "none left", this phrase was one of the most familiar of the war, used to indicate a sense of failure or mediocrity, "finished" or even "dead". It could close a conversation in any indefinite way, or describe the way the Allies feared the war might end. For German soldiers a naplü was a beer, and a naplüchen a cognac – clearly alcohol was in short supply on that side of the Front. Usage: In response to the demand for more rum, the Sergeant replied, "Narpoo!"
Ocean Villas
A highly detailed scale model of a section of WW1 trench.
Mangling French placenames 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