A history of the English Language

214.
The World Wars.
As another example of how great developments or events leave their mark upon language 
we may observe some of the words that came into English between 1914 and 1918 as a 
direct consequence of World War I. Some of these were military terms representing new 
methods of warfare, such as 
air raid, antiaircraft gun, tank,
and 
blimp
.
 Gas mask
and 
liaison officer
were new combinations with a military significance. 
Camouflage
was 
borrowed from French, where it had formerly been a term of the scene-painter’s craft, but 
it caught the popular fancy and was soon used half facetiously for various forms of 
disguise or misrepresentation. Old words were in some cases adapted to new uses. 
Sector
was used in the sense of a specific portion of the fighting line; 
barrage,
originally an 
artificial barrier like a dam in a river, designated a protective screen of heavy artillery or 
machine-gun fire; 
dud,
a general word for any counterfeit thing, was specifically applied 
to a shell that did not explode; and 
ace
acquired the meaning of a crack airman, 
especially one who had brought down five of the enemy’s planes. In a number of cases a 
word that had had only limited circulation in the language now came into general use. 
Thus 
hand grenade
goes back to 1661 but attained new currency during the war. Other 
expressions already in the language but popularized by the war were 
dugout, machine 
gun, periscope, no man’s land,
and even the popular designation of an American soldier, 
doughboy,
which was in colloquial use in the United States as early as 1867. 
Blighty
was 
a popular bit of British army slang, derived from India and signifying Britain or home, 
and was often applied to a wound that sent a man back to Britain. Other expressions such 
as 
slacker, trench foot, cootie,
and 
war bride
were either struck off in the heat of the 
A history of the english language 282

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moment or acquired a poignant significance from the circumstances under which they 
were used. 
It would seem that World War II was less productive of memorable words, as it was of 
memorable songs. Nevertheless it made its contribution to the language in the form of 
certain new words, new meanings, or an increased currency for expressions that had been 
used before. In connection with the 
air raid,
so prominent a feature of the war, we have 
the words and expressions 
alert
(air-raid warning), 
blackout, blitz
(German 
Blitzkrieg,
literally ‘lightning war’), 
blockbuster, dive-bombing, evacuate,
air-raid 
shelter
. The 
words 
beachhead, parachutist, paratroop, landing strip, crash landing, roadblock, jeep, 
fox hole
(as a shelter for one or two men), 
bulldozer
(an American word used in a new 
sense), 
decontamination, task force
(a military or naval unit assigned to the carrying out 
of a particular operation), 
resistance movement,
and 
radar
are not in the first edition of 
the 
OED
or its 1933 Supplement. 
To spearhead
an attack, 
to mop up,
and 
to appease
were new verbs or old verbs with a new military or political significance. 
Flak
(antiaircraft fire) was taken over from German, where it is an abbreviation of 
Fliegerabwehrkanone,
‘antiaircraft gun’. 
Commando,
a word that goes back to the Boer 
War, acquired a new and specialized meaning. Some words that were either new or that 
enjoyed great currency during the war—
priority, tooling up, bottleneck, ceiling
(upper 
limit), 
backlog, stockpile
—have become a part of the vocabulary of civilian life, while 
lend-lease
has passed into history. The aftermath of the war gave us such expressions as 
iron curtain, cold war, fellow traveler, front organization, police state,
all with a very 
special connotation.