The Linguistic Landscape of War

Author of “Word Origins and Their Romantic Stories”, Wilfred Funk, has estimated that in the last four years of the Second World War, 24,000 new words entered the American vocabulary.

The conflicts of the twentieth century have irreversibly changed the face of the contemporary linguistic landscape, with The Great War and World War II having particularly defined those peaks, valleys and plains which constitute twenty-first century language and thought. If you take 8,689,467 men from different class backgrounds, add a pinch of stress and three tablespoons of fear, force them under the lid of a melting pot and set your calendar to 1914, it will result in a lot of lingering slang entrenched into a now ruined pan. “It was a very creative time for language”, says Julian Walker of the British Library, “Soldiers have always had a genius for slang and coming up with terms. This was a citizen army - and also the first really literate army - and at the end of the war, those that survived took their new terms back to the general population.” It is thanks to these soldiers that we can now feel “washed-out”, “fed-up” and - at the end of it all –“push up daisies”. In 1944 the Sunday Times reported, “The United Nations’ indictment of 24 Nazi leaders has brought a new word into the language –genocide”. Despite the fact that there had been mass extermination of one and a half million ethnic Armenians in the 1915 Ottoman Empire, no specific word was developed to describe the action. Indeed, Hitler himself felt these actions to be insignificant when, as he prepared to invade Poland, he questioned, “Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?” Hitler’s actions also altered the term “Holocaust” which people had previously known as, “whole burnt offering; wholesale sacrifice or destruction” (1911 first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary) and which was used generally to refer to mass death - as was seen in “The Great Gatsby” where Fitzgerald describes the protagonist’s death as a “holocaust complete”. Today the word has been deposited under the scope of the Nazi World War II genocide. Adolf Hitler’s influence extends to the word “Fuhrer” which has felt the effects of erosion in modern German politics as a result of the Second World War. The word translates as “political party leader” and, prior to Hitler’s declaration of himself as “Fuhrer”, it had been a commonplace title. Today, however, a new term, “Vorsitzender” (chairman), has risen over the linguistic landscape of Germany, and “Fuhrer” has been blown away by the winds of war. It is true that war picks at, pulls and destroys; however, as Robert C. Ruark said in a newspaper column in 1950, “That seems to be one of the nicer things about war - it enriches the language so.” Ruby B and Emily H (Lower Sixth)