Made In America (56 page)

Battles, too, often went by a variety of names, particularly those of the American Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant didn’t refer to the
Battle of Shiloh
but of
Pittsburg Landing.
To the North it was
Bull Run,
but to the South it was
Manassas.
The northern
Antietam
was the southern
Sharpsburg,
as the southern>
Murfreesboro, Perryville
and
Boonsboro
were to northerners respectively
Stone River, Chaplin Hills
and
South Mountain.
¹⁷

Wars are always linguistically productive, though military slang and terminology, like armies themselves, tend to be continuously replaced with fresh recruits. In consequence, battlefield terms usually either survive more or less indefinitely –
bomb
dates from 1582, grenade (from pomegranate and ultimately from
Granada
) from 1532 – or else fade from the vocabularies of all but military historians.

Almost all that survives from the period of the American Revolution, apart from the (mostly mythical) slogans and catchphrases discussed already in Chapter 3, is a single song: ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. It was the most popular tune of the day, sung by both sides with lyrics that chided the other. No one knows who first sang it or when, though the mocking tone of the words in the best-known version suggests British authorship:

If you have ever wondered why Yankee Doodle called the feather in his cap macaroni, the answer is that macaroni was a slang term of the day for a fop. The feather in his cap possibly alluded to the habit of colonial soldiers, who often had no uniforms, of sticking a feather of piece of paper in their caps as a means of distinguishing themselves during battle.

The War of 1812 gave us, again as we have already seen, the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and Uncle Sam, plus
conscript
as both a noun and a verb and two catch-phrases of some durability: ‘Don’t give up the ship’ and ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours.’ The first belongs to Captain James
Lawrence and the second to Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry.

Not until we get to the Civil war period do we at last begin to encounter strictly military terms that have passed into wider usage. Among the Civil War neologisms that are still with us are
KP
(for
kitchen police
),
AWOL
(
absent without leave
),
pup-tents
(originally known as
dog-tents
), and, rather surprisingly,
doughboy
and
grapevine
in the context of rumours.
Doughboy
appears to have been first applied to Union soldiers during the 1860s. (The earliest reference is found in the memoirs of George Armstrong Custer in 1867, but the context indicates that it was already widely known.) The origins are entirely mysterious. Since early colonial times small fried cakes had been known as
doughboys,
and the word may betoken a similarity in appearance between these cakes and the buttons on cavalry soldiers’ uniforms, but it is no more than a guess. At all events, the term faded from sight after about 1870 and didn’t catch on again until World War I.
¹⁹
Grapevine, or grapevine telegraph,
as a notional medium for the transformation of rumours, is equally mysterious. It was widely used during the Civil War, usually with the sense of a wholly unreliable rumour, but what precisely inspired it is unknown.

We have been conditioned by Hollywood to think of Union soldiers dressed identically in blue and Confederate troops in grey. In fact, for the first year or so of the war most soldiers wore the uniforms of their state militias, which came in any number of colours. Troops from Iowa and Wisconsin, for instance, wore grey uniforms that were very like the official Confederate outfits, leading to endless confusion on the battlefield. After the North lost the first battle of Bull Run because Union troops failed to fire on an advancing contingent of Virginia militia, mistaking them for northern allies, the War Department rushed into production hundreds of thousands of standard uniforms. These were manufactured with an old process employing recycled woollen fibres and
known as
shoddy.
Because the uniforms were poorly made and easily came unstitched,
shoddy
came to denote any article of inferior quality. The system of producing uniforms
en masse
also led, incidentally, to the introduction of standard graduated sizes, a process that was carried over to civilian life after the war.
²⁰

One myth of the Civil War period is that
hooker
for a prostitute arose from the camp followers of General Joseph Hooker. It is true that the cadres of sexual entrepreneurs who followed Hooker’s men from battlefield to battlefield were jocularly known as
Hooker’s Division
or
Hooker’s Reserves,
but
hooker
itself predates the Civil War. It was first noted in 1845 in reference to a section of New York,
Corlear’s Hook,
also known as
The Hook,
where prostitutes congregated.
²¹

One term that did spring to prominence during the Civil War, though again of greater antiquity, was the
Mason-Dixon line.
It had been laid out a century earlier by the English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who were brought to America in 1763 to resolve a long-standing border dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland. Though we tend to think of the Mason-Dixon line as a straight east-west demarcation, a good quarter of it ran north-south. It was only coincidentally that it delineated the boundary between slave and non-slave states. Had it not been for this, the line would very probably have been forgoften, which would have been unfortunate because it was one of the great scientific feats of its age. Mason and Dixon were not merely surveyors but accomplished astronomers and mathematicians, and their achievement in drawing an accurate line across 244 miles of wilderness had a measure of heroism and scientific scrutiny not easily appreciated today. To the dismay of historians, Mason’s careful notes of his four years’ work disappeared for almost a century. Then in 1860 they turned up – no one knows how or why – two thousand miles from where they had last been seen, on a rubbish heap
in Nova Scotia, where they were about to be burned.
²²

A final, incidental linguistic legacy of the war between the states was the term
sideburns,
named for the Union commander Ambrose E. Burnside, whose distinctive mutton-chop whiskers inspired a fashion and became known as
burnsides.
Within a decade the syllables had been transposed, but quite how or why is anyone’s guess.

After its brief flurry of creativity during the Civil War, military terminology then grows quiet for nearly half a century.
Roughriders,
from the Spanish-American War,
limey
for a British sailor, and
leathernecks
for Marines (so called because for a decade in the late nineteenth century they wore a uniform with a leather lining in the collar; it was said to be excruciatingly uncomfortable)
²³
effectively exhaust the list of neologisms from the period 1870-1917.

But the outbreak of global hostilities with World War I prompted an outpouring of new terms, many of which are with us yet. Among the words or expressions that entered the common argot during the period are
dog tags, chowhound
and
chowtime, convoy, dawn patrol, dogfight, eyewash, to go west
(actually much older, but not widely used before about 1918),
stunt, shellshock, gadget, to scrounge, booby trap, foxhole, brass hat, MP
for military police,
civvies
for civilian clothes,
draftee, pipe down
as a call for quiet (it originated in the nautical use of pipes to announce changes of watch and the like) and
to swing the lead.
²⁴

From the British came
bridgehead, ack-ack, blimp, tank
and, rather unexpectedly,
basket case
for a severely wounded combatant.
Blimp
arose from its official designation: ‘Dirigible: Type B-Limp’, and
ack-ack
was a slang shortening
of anti-aircraft,
based on British telephonic code for the letters
AA.

From the Germans came
zeppelin
(named for Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, its designer),
black market
(from German
Schwarzmarkt
) and
Big Bertha
for an outsized gun. As
was their custom, the Germans had named the gun after the wife of the head of Krupp Steel, the manufacturer, and with a certain lack of delicacy had called it not
Big Bertha
but
Fat Bertha.
Quite how Frau Krupp received this signal honour is not known.

From France, meanwhile, came
parachute, camouflage
(rather oddly from
camouflet,
meaning ‘to blow smoke up someone’s nose’, a pastime that appears on the linguistic evidence to be specific to the French) and
barrage
(from
tir de barrage
) in the sense of concentrated artillery fire.
Barrage
already existed in English with the meaning of a barrier across a waterway, but previously had been pronounced to rhyme with
disparage.
²⁵

Somewhat surprisingly, World War II was considerably less prolific of new terminology than World War I once you strip out those terms like
Lend Lease,
VE Day and
Luftwaffe
that are now used primarily in a historical context. Among the relatively few terms to come to prominence during the period and to live on after the war were
bazooka, blackout, GI, liberty
for shore leave,
pin-up girl, Mae West
for an inflatable jacket,
task force, jeep, blitzkrieg, flak, fascism, gestapo, kamikaze, displaced person, blockbuster
(originally a bomb sufficiently powerful to destroy an entire city block, and later of course appropriated by the entertainment industry), the expression
the greatest thing since sliced bread
and, not least, a robust and inventive use of the word
fuck.
One of the last named’s offshoots is
snafu,
often said to be an abbreviation of ‘situation normal, all
fouled
up’, but don’t you believe it. Once there were many more in like vein – namely,
tuifu
(’the ultimate in fuck-ups’)
and fubar
(’fucked up beyond all recognition’). The use of
fucked
as a general descriptive (’this engine is completely fucked’) appears also to be a legacy of World War II.

Several World War II words, it will be noted, were foreign creations.
Blitzkrieg
(literally ‘lightning war’),
flak
(a contraction of
Fliegerabwehrkanone,
’anti-aircraft gun’)
and gestapo
(from
Geheime Staatspolizei,
‘Secret State Police’) are of obvious German derivation. Also from Nazi Germany came one of our more chilling phrases,
final solution
(German
Endlösung
) coined by Reinhard ‘The Hangman’ Heydrich. Fascism dates from long before the war – from 1919, in fact, when Benito Mussolini launched the
Fascismo
movement in Italy – but came to prominence only in the period just before the war. It comes from the Latin
fasces,
‘bundle’, and alludes to a bundle of rods that was used both as a tool of execution and a symbol of authority in imperial Rome.
²⁶
Kamikaze
is of course Japanese. It means ‘divine wind’, and commemorates a timely typhoon that routed a Mongol seaborne attack early in Japan’s history.

Among the native-born terms that are not self-evident,
bazooka
was called after a comical stage prop – a kind of homemade trombone – used by a popular comedian named Bob Burns, and
GI
stands for
general issue,
the initials stamped on all military property. No one knows quite when
GI
was first applied to soldiers, but
GI Joe
can be dated with certainty. He first appeared in the 17 June 1942 issue of
Yank,
the armed forces newspaper, in a cartoon drawn by Dave Berger.
²⁷

Jeep,
as a concept if not as a word, slightly predates America’s involvement in the war. In 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, the Army introduced a sturdy vehicle for negotiating rough terrain. The jeep was actually not a very good vehicle. It was heavy, difficult to manoeuvre, devoured oil, had a chronically leaky water pump and cylinder head, and could run continuously for no more than four hours. But something about its boxy shape and go-anywhere capabilities earned it instant and widespread affection. No one knows how it got its name. The most common, and seemingly most plausible, explanation is that it is taken from the letters
GP,
short for
General Purpose.
The problem is that
General Purpose
was never officially part of its title, and doesn’t appear on any documents associated with it. The Army with its usual gift for
clunky appellations termed it a
truck, quarter ton, four-by-four.
More puzzlingly, the prototype for the jeep was generally known – for reasons now lost – as a
peep.
Mencken stoutly maintains that
jeep
comes from the Popeye the Sailor comic strip written by EC Segar.
²⁸
It is true that a character named Eugene the Jeep appeared in the strip as early as March 1936, though no one has ever explained how, or more pertinently why, that character’s name would have been applied to a four-wheel-drive vehicle. What is certain is that Segar did give the world another useful word at about the same time,
goon,
named for simian-like characters in the strip.

Towards the end of the war, a slogan, often accompanied by a cartoon drawing of the top half of a face peering over a fence or other barrier, mysteriously began appearing wherever the US Army went. The slogan was ‘Kilroy was here’. No one has any idea who this Kilroy was. The figure at whom the finger is most often pointed is James J. Kilroy, an inspector of military equipment in Quincy, Massachusetts, who was said to have chalked the three famous words on crates of equipment that were then dispatched to the far corners of the world. Others attribute it with equal assurance to a Sergeant Francis Kilroy of the Army Air Transport Command, who would also have had the opportunity to place his name on boxes of supplies and munitions. But the theories are manifold. One desperately imaginative scholar has even interpreted it as an anti-authoritarian
Kill Roi,
or ‘Kill the King’
^*32