WAR WORDS

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 2961, 27 December 1916, Page 7

WAR WORDS

THE ORIGIN OF "BLIGHTY." A word which has come into general use during the war is'"Blighty," the soldier'® word for homo. This word! has been used by the army in India for a long time, and Sir George Birdwood, ail authority on India and Hindustani, thinks that the word is a ■ corruption by the British soldiers in India of rthe Hindustani word "vilaytj," sometimes pronounced) by Indians themselves as "wylati" and "bilayti," meaning literally "people near the confines of India"—that is, foreigners— this term being' applied by nativo In--dians to Persians, Turks, and Englishmen. A Parsee lady stated in a London newspaper last July that "vilayet" is the Persian word for home, and that the popular corruption of this word in Hindustani is "bilaat," and the adjective is "vilayet-i." Dr. Henry, Bradley thinks tho word comes' not directly from the proper name, but from the adjectival derivative "Bilayati," European,, as in "Bilayati pani," "European water"—that is, soda water.

The discussion of the word "Blighty" reminds one of tho unconsidered sources of some other army words —"patrol," for instance, which seems to havo come into use in England in the seventeenth century.- It derives from French petrouiller —to paddle or puddle in the mud', altered from the earlier patouille. French dialect still has patrouil—mire. In military use, Murray says, it was probably first a piece of French camp slang, patrolling consisting often (then as now) of tramping through mud andi wet. "Patrol" is no longer slang, and the course of time may similarly exalt some army slang of to-day into King's English. But when a soldier writes home that he is "iu the pink" ("of condition" being understood) he uses a phrase'quite poetic in origin, deriv-ed'from-the flower of that name,' and meaning tho flower or perfection of excellence. Meroutio called himself "the very pinck. of couitesie,"; and Burns wrote in "The Posie": I will pu', the pink, the emblem o' my dear, 1 For she's the pink o' womankind and blooms without a peer. ; Another t word, "grouse,"! is a provincial word still in use lor "worrying and scratching," according to Waro, who includes it in his "Passing English of the Victorian Era." (It seems to have taken a new lease of life in King' George's reign.) "Grouse," to complain or grumble, is used in the counties of Oxford, Middlesex, and Sussex, and "grouser" is not new as army slang. The word belongs to the same unpleasant family as. grumpy, grunt, groan, and grudge. Though we do not own it in Lancashire, a similar word, "groach'," occurs, in a fifteenth century Lancashire ballad of a tyrannical husband, preserved' in the Chetham College library; the husband complaining that his wife ever excuses herself with groaches and'groans—oblivious of the fact that he is himself grousing at great length about her faults. —"Manchester Guardian."