War

“War is the greatest excitant of new vocabulary,” observed Eric Partridge (1948, 115). Apart from the technical neologisms, it is the social context of war hysteria, especially acute xenophobia, that obviously generates negative stereotypes, opprobrious names, and ethnic slurs for the enemy. Thus a considerable number of prime examples are to be found under the headings for French, Germans, and Japanese. Others, such as gook and hun have their own entries. Of these, hun is unique, being first publicized by the Germans themselves, in 1900. A general semantic consequence of war, covered in soldiers and sailors, is that slurs and swearwords are given wider currency in society by civilians returning from the hostilities.

The earliest instance, a memorial of the Hundred Years’ War, is goddems , the revealing nickname given by the French to the English, a point treated further in the entry for goddam. The typical generation of nicknames for the enemy is shown in the German group from World War I: boche (1914), Fritz (1915), kraut (1918), and jerry (1919). Hitler was used as a stereotypical nickname from 1934, often preceded by the demeaning adjective little , a description still current in British English. Alternatively, jap and gook were originally generalized nicknames before taking on an especially xenophobic edge during World War II and the Vietnam War, respectively.

Sometimes words become drawn randomly into a specialized emotive sense by the context of war. Thus by Jingo! , a piece of “sonorous nonsense,” was variously interpreted as conjurors’ gibberish and a minced oath from the seventeenth century. However in 1878 it suddenly became a bellicose rallying cry for supporters of British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s policy of “active intervention” in the Balkans, largely through the popular music-hall song by George Hunt with its topical refrain: “We don’t want to fight, But by Jingo! if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, We’ve got the money too!” The phrase rapidly spawned the related forms jingo, jingodom , the verb to jingo , as well as jingoism and jingoist , both still current and critical of aggressive and chauvinist attitudes. During the Boer War (1899–1902) even the uniform term khaki took on the symbolic and figurative sense of “possessed by a militant spirit,” expanding into other forms and phrases like khaki election (of 1902) and to vote khaki. Chauvinist itself is an eponym deriving from an idolatrous worshipper of Napoleon, Nicolas Chauvin, whose excessive patriotism was satirized in a play, Le Cocarde Tricolore (1831). Both Chauvinist and Chauvinism were borrowed into English from 1870 referring to exaggerated and bellicose patriotism. Stereotypical national figures like John Bull and Uncle Sam tend to take on martial connotations in times of war. John Bullism developed such a currency throughout the nineteenth century when British colonial expansionism was rampant. The iconic figure of Uncle Sam has been used in a similar fashion, both patriotically and xenophobically. Yankee , which has its own entry, was first used of the northern states, but as Mencken points out, “During the Civil War, as everyone knows, the Southerners used [ Yankee ], usually contemptuously, of all Northerners” (1963, 122). In times of martial solidarity, treachery and collaboration become obviously detestable, generating eponyms like Quisling and Haw Haw (the English Nazi propagandist William Joyce) discussed further under treachery.