A bit of attitude, and possibly altitude, in defining 'strafe' (1919)

In the volume of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (later to become the OED) covering Si to St, published in 1919, there are very few quotations illustrative of usage which date from after 1910. 

One entry which had to have recent quotations was the very recent adoption of the word 'strafe'. The entry is headed: 

  ‘Strafe, v. slang. [From the Ger. phrase Gott strafe England, ‘God punish England’, a common salutation in Germany in 1914 and the following years.] trans. Used (originally by British soldiers in the war against Germany) in various senses suggested by its origin : To punish; to do damage to ; to attack fiercely ; to heap imprecations on …’ 

The citations are worth quoting as they indicate a number of concepts. Firstly amusement at, and a bit of superiority over the German language – ‘1916 Times Lit. Suppl. 10 Feb.62/1 The Germans are called the Gott-strafers, and strafe is becoming a comic English word’. How to beat your enemy - take a hate-word and turn it into a comic word; it's not far from the way the gay community seized the word 'queer' and by using it removed its barbs.

This is followed by the awesomely dismissive: '1916 Blackw. Mag. Feb. 284/1 Intermittent strafes we are used to.'

Then a languid sense of superiority, emphasised by the taking over of an enemy word – ‘1916 MS.Let. fr. Front (Feb or Mar.) There is not much Hun artillery fire, but as our guns strafe them well every day, I expect they will wake up and return the compliment.’ 

And the same sense of amusement in ‘1916 Daily Mail 1 Nov. 4/4 the word strafe is now almost universally used. Not only is an effective bombardment of the enemy’s lines or a successful trench raid described by Tommy as ‘strafing the Fritzes,’ but there are occasions when certain ‘brass hats’ … are strafed by imprecation. And quite recently the present writer heard a working-class woman … shout to one of her offspring ‘Wait till I git ‘old of yer, I’ll strarfe yer, I will!’

All of these defuse the power of the German word, and give a sense of not being impressed or disturbed by it at all – it becomes little more than a word to frighten children with. How do we read this? How does the selection of illustrations indicate how this group of lexicographers looked back at the war? It is hard not to interpret their attitude as one of amused superiority.  

Two versions of Archie, and some others

A handful of notable entries from post-First World War dictionaries. First, from Cassell's New English Dictionary 1919:

Frigo - (Soldiers' slang) Frozen or chilled meat

Huff (Airman's slang) - to kill

and

To Lusitania - (slang) to torpedo (esp. a large passenger-ship) 

All of these usages have disappeared I assume, though 'huffing' is still a term used in draughts (does anyone play draughts still?). The days are thankfully past when anyone would have occasion to 'Lusitania', and even gallows humour scarcely excuses it. But I did laugh out loud when I saw 'frigo' - definitely one for the slang counter at Iceland.

Cassell's also has an interesting definition for 'Archie' - actually 'Archies':

[nickname from the popular song, 'Archibald, certainly not',' with allusion to the fewness of the hits made], n.pl. (Soldiers' slang) Anti-aircraft guns or shells; the anti-aircraft force.

And in Collins' Etymological Dictionary (1922) there is:

Archies n.pl. the anti-aircraft force; also, the guns and shells. The name is said to have been given, owing to the fewness of the hits, from the song, "Archibald, certainly not." 

Rather different from the version given by Ernest Weekley in his An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1921): 

Archibald, Archie: “It was at once noticed at Brooklands [where much aviation development and testing was carried out prior to 1914, and portrayed in the film Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines] that in the vicinity of, or over, water or damp ground, there were disturbances in the air causing bumps or drops to these early pioneers. Some of these ‘remous’ were found to be permanent, one over the Wey river, and another at the corner of the aerodrome next to the sewage-farm. Youth being fond of giving proper names to inanimate objects, the bump near the sewage-farm was called by them Archibald. As subsequently, when war broke out, the effect of having shell bursting near an aeroplane was to produce a ‘remous’ reminding the Brookland trained pilots of their old friend Archibald, they called being shelled ‘being Archied’ for short. Any flying-man who trained at Brooklands before the war will confirm the above statement” (Col. C H Joubert de la Ferté, I M S ret.).

A few more details and thoughts, first posted on the Languages and the First World War website last year:

 

Col. Charles Henry Joubert de la Ferté, of the Indian Medical Service was 68 when the war broke out, and lived in Weybridge, where Brooklands is located. Brooklands had been in use for at least 7 years by this time - A V Roe and Tommy Sopwith both tested planes there. Whether the term was picked up from the song or whether the song reinforced the chosen word is difficult to determine without more evidence, but it is not impossible that aviators, on being shot at, would express words to the effect that whatever was coming towards them was certainly not as harmless as the warm air rising from a sewage farm.

So, 'Archie' for the shellfire, and 'Archies' for those who sent it up all seems reasonable. But which way were aviators trying to comfort themselves, either by claiming the enemy were not good shots, or by claiming that they were as harmless as hot air?  Or, to put it another way, were they just crap shots, or were they just crap?

A couple of surprising Jack Johnsons

In the first months of the First World War there were references to slang terms for weapons in usages which seem at best thoughtless, and more likely shocking now, however innocent in intent may have been their use at the time; this is with hindsight, and they appeared before the horrors of trench warfare, the use of gas and the scale of the casualties were widely known. As the war progressed usages like these for recreational objects or activities became less common; the use by civilians (especially politicians) of any slang terms that had a basis in the experience of military combat, such as 'under fire' and 'over the top', were strongly condemned by G K Chesterton in the Illustrated London News 14 December 1918 . 

The Rochdale Observer on 31 October 1914 carried an advertisement for fireworks that read: 

Fireworks! Fireworks!

Ask for “Black Maria” or “Jack Johnson” shells 

Wholesale House :- Edwards & Bryning Ltd, ...

and the Western Gazette 11 December 1914 carried an advertisement for a box of 100 toys marketed by the Allies Toy Co in Brighton, which included a scenario described thus:

 Boom! – Oom! – Om! – M! – Bang!!! 

The “Jack Johnson” great German Gun is at work. First 25 harmless shells explode with a bang, then the Red Cross Nurses and their white Tents appear on the scene to deal with the wounded. 

The term is used here for the gun rather than the shell, a late occurrence for this usage, but not an isolated incident.

Addition to the post on the non-gendering of infants

Now, this is an interesting addition to the question of the non-gendering of infants in the nineteenth century. Lindley Murray's 'English Grammar' was on its forty-seventh edition in 1834, and easily the most popular textbook on the subject. First published in 1795, during the 1830s it was available in embossed print for the blind, and was translated into Marathi for Indian students.

This is from p151, in the section in Syntax on pronoun agreement :

We hardly consider little children as persons, because that term gives us the idea of reason and reflection: and therefore the application of the personal relative who, in this case, seems to be harsh: "A child who." It is still more improperly applied to animals: "A lake frequented by that fowl whom nature has taught to dip the wing in water." 

This is purely from the point of view of grammar, but it suggests that it is based on the idea that gender is something that is grown into, or acquired with the ability to reason and reflect. Or that adults would take no notice of gender until the powers of reason and reflection were also noticeable. Is it proposing that gender-acquisition is dependent upon the ability to reason and reflect? This is curious given that it was within a world where the statuses of male and female were profoundly different. All rather perplexing, especially given Murray's philanthropic mindset.

Shell shock and trench coat

Corrections to this post, as the dates were wrong

An advertisement for Phosferine in The Sphere 23 October 1915 (not 1914, as previously proposed): Phospherine is stated as being good for ‘nervous exhaustion and stunning of senses caused by shell shock’.

What is interesting about 'shell shock' is that the term here is not used for the physiological condition but the cause of the physiological condition - the shock of the shell causes the nervous exhaustion and stunning of the senses, the neurological condition that later would be called 'shell-shock'. 

The (now) earliest recorded use of 'trench coat' was in Punch on 23 December 1914, in an advertisement for Thresher and Glenny: 'Shell made of hard khaki drill, lined sheepskin, and a special interlining, rendering it absolutely waterproof. 
Wind, wet and mud resisting.'

The effects of infant mortality in the nineteenth century as seen in the non-gendering of babies in literature

 

The incidence of infant mortality in the 19^th century beggars belief. Arthur Leared, physician at the Great Northern Hospital near King’s Cross in London, begins his article ‘Infant Mortality and its Causes’ (1862) with the statistic: ‘About one-fourth of all the children born in this civilized country perish miserably in the first year of their existence’. He compares the lot of animals to that of humans, noting that ‘the free agency of man caused an indifference to the strongest of all natural obligations, and that the results of apathy and ignorance are mistaken for those of a natural law’. The drift from the countryside to the cities and towns created conditions where disease was bound to carry off the weakest, and in 1915 Hugh Ashby noted that ‘the conditions generally found in towns are far more inimical to infant life than those in the country’ [Infant Mortality, Cambridge, 1915]. However, many factors caused the high incidence of infant mortality, Ashby citing poverty, the lack of skill in childcare, improper feeding, alcohol and opium abuse, as well as the myriad of diseases that carried children off suddenly and to which 19^th-century medicine had no answer.

The statistics did not change much through the course of the century. In 1827 more than one in four children born in the east London area of Bethnal Green died before reaching the age of two (Alan Palmer The East End (2000) p 60).  While Ashby cited rates of between 13% and 16.3% (mortality specifically before 12 months) from 1880 to 1900, C F Masterman in The Condition of England (1909/11) reported 20% infant mortality in the Pottery towns [p137].

Some writers moved in areas where the figures, spiralling out of control, seemed to invoke the spectres of diseases that science was banishing to the past. The Countess of Ebersburg, in Six out of Ten: an Awful Bill (1877), reported that eighty per cent of infants deaths were caused not just by scarlatina, diphtheria, hooping cough, and measles, but also by ‘miasma’, ‘convulsions’ and ‘cholera infantum’ (caused by ‘bad air and bad food’) [p2]. Elsewhere she mentions ‘marasmus, the slow fading and wasting away of scrofulous little children’, and ‘miasmatic germs, or crowd poison’ [pp3, 5]. The countess calculated that ‘of all the little babes born in one year SIX OUT OF TEN die ere they reach the fifth year’ [p10]. Leared notes that ‘it is no uncommon thing’ for only one child in a family of eight or ten to survive [p8,9].

These startling statistics were not limited to the parts of a major cities that had poor sanitation or whose residents had low incomes or limited education. Mary Shelley lost three of her four children, at the ages of two weeks, one year, and three years; Byron’s daughter Allegra died at the age of five; Charles Lamb was one of seven siblings, of whom four died as infants; Elizabeth Gaskell and her brother John were the two out of the eight children born to their parents who survived infancy. Childbirth itself was likely to produce casualties, with both mother and child at risk, even in hospital. James Young Simpson in his work showing the value of anaesthetic quoted statistics showing that in the last two decades of the eighteenth century in London mortality rates for mothers in parturition were 1 in 110; the rate countrywide for 1841 was still 1 in 170 (Anæsthesia, or the Employment of chloroform and ether in surgery, midwifery, etc., Philadelphia, 1949, pp 48-9).

Destitution and starvation were killers too. William Blake, whose sensibilities embraced the world of the young child (how many ‘babes’ are there in Songs of Innocence and of Experience?), was portraying the real world in ‘Holy Thursday’ (Experience), both in the words ‘Babes reduced to misery’ and in the image of the woman staring at the dead infant abandoned on the ground.

It is not surprising that this high risk of loss of a child should affect the parent-baby relationship. At the heart of the parent-baby relationship lay the long-standing idea that newborn children were ‘on loan’. Shakespeare’s Capulet in Romeo and Juliet states of his daughter that ‘God had lent us but this only child’, all the Capulet’s other children having died young. This sense of children being on loan rather than permanent survived into the Victorian era, creating a culture in which there was a close association between babies and death – witness the vogue for carte de visite photographs of dead babies. Babies  were seen as ‘visiting angels’ (Jonathan Miller, BBC, 4 Jan 1998), and the dead were wrapped in shrouds which resembled baby clothes (Julian Litten, The English Way of Death, 1991, p 84). Though heartbreak was real for the bereaved parents, there could also be a kind of commitment avoidance in the delaying of naming children till they had survived the first few months of life.

Given that babies ran a one in four risk of death, and that surviving infancy was such an achievement, it is surprising how seldom this is treated in 19^th-century literature. There seems to be a general absence of interest in babies, or, when they do appear, they are referred to with impersonal and non-gendered terms. While young children in literature of this period may have strong identities babies seldom do; they are adjuncts, almost symbols or props. Where they do function in the plot, they are referred to as ‘it’, ‘baby’, ‘infant’, ‘child’, seldom gendered or named. We have to be careful here to distinguish between two linguistic situations: on one hand where the sex of the child is not known (‘Is it a boy or girl?’), and on the other where it is ignored, examples of which I here present. The avoidance of stating the gender of babies, evidenced by the use of the word ‘it’, is part of the non-engagement with babies as individuals, seen in repeated incidences in nineteenth-century literature. 

Wordsworth’s uncomfortable poem The Thorn (1789) deals with the anguish brought on by rejection and pregnancy outside marriage; the existence of the infant, and the death of the infant, exerts a strong force within the poem, but the baby never breaks through to actual identity. Marian in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 poem Aurora Leigh is found to have a child, but it is several pages before we find that the child is male; he is addressed as ‘the child’, ‘my lamb’, ‘my flower, my pet’, but even seven years later along the plot-line we do not know the child’s name.

The youngest member of the Pocket family in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) is continually referred to or addressed as ‘baby’, the child’s name or gender never being revealed, despite being a clearly defined character. In Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), when Gabriel Oak erases the words ‘and child’ from Fanny Robin’s coffin, he is removing the identification of her shame, and protecting her memory, but in so doing effecting the removal of the ungendered child’s existence. Though Bathsheba castigates Troy for kissing ‘them’, the dead mother and ungendered child in the coffin, it is in fact only Fanny’s corpse that he kisses.

In The Prime Minister (1876) by Anthony Trollope we know that Emily’s baby is male – there are five references to ‘him’ and ‘he’ – but while the words ‘baby’, ‘child’ and ‘infant’ are used, ‘son’ and ‘boy’ are not. The baby dies within a few days, and is not named. Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song (1893), a book of nursery rhyme poems, has 13 references to ‘baby’, but only two of them give the gender of the baby. The book notably also contains five rhymes discussing the death of ‘baby’. In E M Forster Howards End (1910) ‘Baby’ is a kind of role-title, bestowed first on Charles and then Margaret; by the end of the book Dolly’s child is ‘Baby’ and ‘the Diddums’.

Even a bereaved mother might omit to bestow a gender in speaking about her child. In March 1816 Mary Shelley’s premature baby died, after her journal entries had referred to her child in non-gendered terms – ‘The child is not quite seven months’, ‘the child not expected to live.’ She wrote to Thomas Jefferson Hogg: ‘My dearest Hogg my baby is dead—will you come to see me as soon as you can. I wish to see you—It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. It was dead then, but we did not find that out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions.’

These examples render more noticeable the cases where babies are treated as individuals.

It is in The Prelude (1799) second part, from line 267 – ‘Blessed the infant babe’ – that we see Wordsworth working from the observation of an individual baby going through the process of learning from his mother; and the baby’s gender is specified within 4 lines. Wordsworth’s view of himself, so strongly based on his childhood, and particularly his view of himself as a poet, was closely connected to the ‘infant sensibility’ noted soon after. It is rare to find a writer of this period viewing him/herself as an infant.

In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) we can trace a development of the importance of the role of the infant through the changing terms: Celia, who is genuinely devoted to her son, calls him ‘baby’ as much as ‘Arthur’. The term ‘the baby’ is used frequently throughout the book, but he is addressed as ‘baby’ seven times before his name, Arthur, is introduced. Arthur’s role is to highlight the childlessness and barrenness of Dorothy’s marriage – it is after the introduction of Arthur’s name that we are told ‘It seemed clear that where there was a baby, things were right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force.’ When Rosamund loses her baby this is referred to as a ‘misfortune’, but clearly means a lot more to Rosamund, who later states ‘I wish I had died with the baby’. The third important birth in the novel fittingly occurs in the ‘Finale’, where Celia announces ‘Dorothea has a little boy’.

On rare occasions we find writers for whom babies were individuals who are addressed directly. Hogg’s Life of Shelley tells the story of the poet addressing a baby on the subject of life before birth: ‘it was a fine placid boy; so far from being disturbed by the interruption, he looked up and smiled.’ It is the kind of direct and ingenuous enquiry one might expect only of Shelley, or Blake. [2408.a..5. Vol 1 p240]. Robert Burns’s A Poet’s Welcome to his Love-begotten Daughter (1785) shows a totally genuine interest in ‘my bonie, sweet, wee dochter’; the poem though was never published. Blake too in his unshackled mind saw babies as not just individuals, but as equals: in ‘Infant Joy’ the two-days old babe names him/herself – there is no need for a gender as the child is addressed directly – and shares the voice of the poem equally with Blake himself.

On selling our children's toys

We have had a busy few weeks selling our teenage sons’ toys. This sounds callous and mean, but the money goes to them, and they will no doubt spend it on things that will bring them transitory enjoyment, and then be put away and forgotten, and possibly sold. That ‘well-known internet auction site’ does provide a relief to the despair we have felt at the awful amassing of goods: we buy, we hold, we pass on, almost as if we leased the toys, and the opportunities they afford to explore stories, from some greater concept – time, life, western culture.

A couple of days ago I went to the post office and consigned a parcel to the post. The toys – a Playmobil jungle set, including rocks, animals, trees, and figures who were meant to be white European explorers and vaguely southern African indigenous people – were made in Germany (which is why they were well-designed, and why they have lasted without breaking); they were bought by a bidder in Canada from me in the UK, and sent to Japan, thus encompassing countries in four continents. It is indeed a global phenomenon of play and mobility. All in all I believe it to be a good thing.

And yet I feel  little uneasy at this particular image that I have peddled on. The white explorers wearing clothes reminiscent of Indiana Jones will continue to explore, facing dangers including crocodiles lurking beneath a bridge with two intentionally broken planks, all the while maintaining the famous Playmobil noselessness and rictus smile. They will meet black people dressed in skirts made from colourful feathers, foliage and leopard-skins, holding spears or banging on drums, smiling, always smiling. Bright birds will sit securely on bright trees while bright snakes woven into coils will sit or swim beside bright lily-pads. An unexplained figure, part fetish part scarecrow will face, across the safely ricketty bridge, a monolith showing unexplained marks referring to an earlier culture, now hidden by a clip-on shower of bright green plants. If the play in any way follows what happened in our house, their meeting will involve surprise, suspicion, conflict, being taken apart, put back together, and ending up in a box under a bed or on top of a wardrobe. The story may be developed (in our case they became involved with pirates and spacemen). The settings will change. Maybe one of the black men will get a white shift and a leopard-skin, and kneel before a young white lady wearing a white crinoline with an extravagant blue sash and a discreet gold tiara with a white ostrich feather, as she hands him a hefty Bible. Maybe there will be a tall white gentleman in a red uniform, and three other figures discreetly shadowy in the background. Of course they will be smiling, but what will they be thinking?

Key in the words ‘explorer’ or ‘jungle’ in the search box on the Playmobil website, and you won’t find the bridge or the drummers or the smiling spear-holders; you’ll see a safari jeep and plenty of animals but not this particular meeting of people of different cultures all smiling that Tony Blair smile. Playmobil has moved on, though for £135 you can replay another smiling meeting of cultures symbolised by a ‘Native American camp with totem pole’ and ‘Western Fort’. The thing about Playmobil is that it is so well made that it will last for a long, long time.