![]() There were cushy billets, cushy jobs, even cushy trenches, where shelling and attacks were sporadic. CushyĬushy came from the Hindi word khush meaning "pleasure". ![]() 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. Many terms in use locally before 1914 gained wider currency as a result of the war. This mixture of Thessalonica and Mesopotamia has an air of resigned humour typical of trench slang. Troops sent to the Balkans or the Middle East often did not have a good idea of where they were. A Canadian trench magazine in 1916 reported wonderfully on sausages dropping "assorted coal-boxes and whizz-bangs". Non-dirigible airships, also called sausages. 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. Soldiers in the trenches learned to identify shells by size, effects or sound. The term was also used for enemy shellfire. 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." Iron rationsĮmergency rations consisted of a tin of bully beef, very hard biscuits and a tin of tea and sugar. ![]() 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. DekkoĪs in "take a dekko at this" (take a look at this). 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. 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. 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. Lie-factoryĪ term applied from September 1914 to German propaganda. The black American heavyweight champion boxer's name was applied at first to the dark smoke given off by a particular large German shell, and later to the shell itself. 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. The following glossary explains the meaning of some of the more common trench slang. The structure of the army at the front influenced this, particularly in the close bonds between public-school-educated junior officers and the men, and the mixing of men from different areas after the introduction of conscription in 1916.
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