Many thanks to Rob Schaefer for bringing this to my
attention.
Rolf Greifelt’s “Der Slang des englischen Soldaten im
Weltkrieg 1914-1918” (English Soldiers’ Slang in the 1914-18 World War) is a
fascinating document. Written as Greifelt’s inaugural doctoral dissertation for
the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Marburg in 1937, it gives a view
into how British (and some other English-speaking) soldiers’ slang was being
recorded and analysed nearly a generation after the conflict. Greifelt was born
in 1910 and studied in Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main, Leeds and Marburg between 1929
and 1935, when he received his doctorate. Thereafter he taught and studied
English, and specifically American English, at Marburg and Heidelberg, before
becoming (I think) a high-school teacher at Darmstadt. He died in March 1945.
The dissertation is divided into three sections: firstly a
discussion of the nature of slang; then, roughly, an investigation of English
soldiers’ slang in terms of 1, its position and meaning within slang generally,
2, the methods of creating and the forms of spoken soldiers’ slang, 3, the
content and forms of words, and the experience of war in speech, and 4, the
distinction between English, German and French soldiers’ speech. The final
section contains some observations on the influence of soldiers’ slang on
postwar English and an extensive, and extremely interesting, glossary, in
several sections. His bibliography includes works on language (Jespersen,
Partridge, Dauzat, Saussure, Brophy & Partridge, Fraser & Gibbons,
etc), novels, comments and memoirs (Graves, Sassoon, Mottram, etc), and several dictionaries.
At this stage I will confine myself to a few points in the
final part of the document, which alone is a very impressive and fascinating
piece of work. It begins with rhyming slang, with a clear awareness of how
rhyming slang develops away from the original phrase – as in the way “butcher’s
hook” becomes “let’s have a butcher’s”. It’s a comprehensive list, three and a
half pages, with such familiars as “apples and stairs”, “north and south”.
There’s a bit of a separation before he gets to the shortening of rhyming slang
(Elliptische Kürzungen) – “china” being the only one of the five that I have
heard in speech; this means a few common examples are missing – “dutch” for
“Duchess of Fife/wife” (Greifelt gives “Duke of Fife”), “tod” for “tod
sloan/alone”, as in “on your tod”, and “trouble” for “trouble and strife/wife”
(Greifelt gives “war and strife” – and, though according to the OED “trouble and strife” was definitely around by 1908,
“war and strife” may have been a more topical variation).
There are words taken from card and dice games, the nonsense
word-making that created “Hoojamakloo” (Greifelt has “hooga ma kloo”), and
“oojiboo”, and hats off to his transcription of “skiboo, skiboo,
skibumpity-bump-skibboo” and others similar. Then there is a keenly observed
section on the anglicisation of foreign words and phrases, from “apree la gare”
to “nix goot” – the words and phrases given being from French, German, Hindi,
Arabic, and Russian. His selection of anglicisations of place-names indicates a
full understanding of the humour derived from these – “Moo Cow Farm” for
Mouquet Farm, “Arm in tears” from Armentières, and the wonderful “Ocean Villas”
for Auchonvillers. Then he examines shortenings, the creation of phrases from
initials, including the backslang process by which RAMC is reversed to give
“Can’t Manage A Rifle” (backslang being the process by which "boy" becomes “yob”). Then there are phrases derived from the trench-experience, some of
them ameliorations such as “hop over”, followed by avoidance language such as
“cop it”. The section ‘Tommies unter sich’ includes words for comrades,
less-favoured soldiers, lice, old soldiers, common trench expressions and
experiences (“to chance one’s arm”, “come the old soldier”, “come unstuck”),
the structure of the army (“red caps”, “brass hats”), and how Tommy described
both enemy and friend. Then there are sections on the terminology applied to
women, food, weapons, cigarettes, alcohol, dying, and finally a few
catchphrases, which again indicate Greifelt’s striking perception of how irony works in English humour – “wasn’t it your crowd that sank the Emden?”, and “what
do you want, jam on it?”
Inevitably, etymology being a continuously developing field,
some of his observations have been superseded. His proposal that “raffish”
developed from the RAF is a great idea, but the OED is now able to show a usage of the word to mean “Showing an attractive lack of regard
for conventional behaviour, appearance, or style; rakish; mischievous; offbeat”
dating from 1906 (it derives from “raff”, which meant “rubbish” in the
fourteenth century).
Though I
like idea of “mungaree” coming from Zulu (Greifelt), the source Green (Green’s
Dictionary of Slang,
OUP, 2011) gives goes back to Nashe in 1599 London. Personally I feel there is
room for a bit of discussion here, as the obvious derivation from the French
manger is clearly linked to Nashe’s “mangery”, but the soft “g” seems a bit of
a jump from the hard “g” of “mungaree”. And the next quote Green gives is from
a Mayhew interviewee in 1861, who thought that “numgare” (sic) was ‘broken
Italian’. It is not until 1886 that the form “mungary” is documented. This may be far
from the story that it was a mistaken form of “I’m hungry”, as heard by
Egyptians and adopted in Egypt by British soldiers, but that may have had a
reinforcing effect, just as Scapa Flow may have reinforced the use of
“scarper” (go/run away), originally from the Italian ‘scarpare’.
Most
interesting (so far) is the observation that the word “Hun” was ‘journalese’. To
test this briefly I looked at how long after the war it survived in the popular
press. Sure enough the Daily Mail was still using it in headlines in 1921 – War
Cat Veteran – Cigarettes That Saved Him From Hun Snipers - appeared on 13th
August 1921. And they were still quoting the word in reports and letters in
March 1922, by which time ‘Bosch(e)’ was long gone. I will be looking through
other papers and periodicals to see how the evidence stacks up.
There is
more, much more, to be examined and explored in this text, so I hope others
will look at Greifelt’s work, particularly whether there was any motivation
behind it. My apologies if my enthusiasm has led my very
dictionary-aided German to mistranslate or misunderstand any of Greifelt’s
text; and if anyone knows any more about Greifelt, and particularly the role of
his text in 1937, we would love to hear from you.
And if anybody feels like submitting a paper on him for a conference, the
British Library and Antwerp University will supply an ideal opportunity in June
2014: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/socialscience/2013/07/wwi.html .
