THE WAR SLANG.

Northern Advocate, 3 December 1921, Page 4

THE WAR SLANG.

New Zealand and other countries «are making their collections of mementoes of the great war, but nowhere is this work being carried on more zealously than it is in London. The Imperial War Museum has been established in the Crystal Palace, and the authorities in charge appear to be making it remarkaJbly complete. The museum 'is even to contain a record of the slang which came into use in the British Army during the war. It should be an interesting compilation, picturesque and amusing, and it will necessarily contain a proportion of phrases which could not be printed by a newspaper without injury to its reputation, though perhaps temporarily stimulating to its circulation. Some of the slang that was in use was merely the current coin of speech in the London and Glasgow slums, some of it came direct from the Old Army, whose language for generations was enriched by •corruptions of Eastern words and phrases, some was native to the far-distant lands whence the New Army gathered to 'the war, and a good deal more was the free rendering by Tommies, Diggers and the rest cf common Arab and French words, or the abbreviation of words peculiar to the great war. No soldier, of course, would, go to the labour of pronouncing the polysyllabic "position" in the course of hi 3 ordinary conversation when "possy" was all that was necessary. Cairo produced a vocabulary that has bocome familiar —"mafeesh," signifying finished, "imshi" ("<get out"), "buckshee" (anything given free). From association with Indian" troops came "serang" (head man), and "pukka" (first class, all right), !thc equivalent of the Diggers' "dinkum." To France we owe the once universal "napoo," derived in all probability froui "II n'y a plus," and used as meaning "No more," "all gone," "fiuished''; "tout suite" ("and the tooter frhe sweeter"), used by thousands of men who could not have spelt the words to save their lives; and the quaini word pronounced as "?<infairyann" ("it doesn't matter"), which in French would be spent "sans fairc rein." "Digger" itself of course, pure war slang, and so is "dud," thought it is difficult to trace the paternity of the latter. The only phrase possessing some dignity that the war gave us is "Gone West," used in the sense of having died or (been killed. A Lor.oon paper lately asserted that the tcrir, dated back to the fighting with North American Indians, who used to speak of going to meet the setting sun as descriptive of death. But it was at once pointed out that the phrase was of fur greater antiquity, for one of the titles of Osiris, "Lord of the Hidden Land," in the remote days of ancient Egypt was "The Dweller in the West." Probably, however, the idea of associating death with the flying of the day in the west is an-old as human life on the earth. But it remained for the great war to bring it into common speech.