Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/556

458 NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 S. IX. DEC. 3, 1921. a, false impression due to the fact that from November, 1916, to March, 1917, 1 was with my reserve unit in England I cannot say, but I have the feeling that the winter of 1916 marks a distinct break in the develop- ment of war slang in our Army. One source of Army slang which has appealed to the British and for which, owing to the differing conditions, there was, so far as the Western front was concerned, very little occasion among the French is the deformation of foreign (in this case French) words and phrases due. in the first place, to faulty pronunciation, but often deliberately extended with humorous in- tent ; this was one cause of the Army ver- sions of the more familiar place-names of Northern France, as in many cases the name was seen before being heard hence Wipers. Of this class probably the most common is napoo, which quickly became synonymous with " finished," and then, following a well- known tendency of slang, with " dead." Another favourite is trezbeans, which is originally faulty pronunciation extended for the sake of the humorous reference to a certain staple article of diet ; on the other hand, a phrase like common tallow candles is a deliberate perversion of " comment allez-vous," and so there should be no sur- prise at finding a variety of answers from the simple trezbeans to the somewhat recondite fray bentos. I have mentioned the break which apparently occurs in Army slang about the winter of 1916, and though this may be largely fancy it is perhaps worth noting that it was about this time that men from the Eastern theatres of war began to make their way in appreciable numbers into the forces on the Western front and to bring with them their own special vocabulary derived from their experiences in Egypt and Salonica ; perhaps the word which had the greatest success is bucJcshee, which, though forming part of the pre-war slang, seems to have acquired new vitality from the re -introduction of the Army to the original ; personally I do not remember hearing it used until the period to which I have referred. In spite of the large numbers involved the British soldier does not appear to have developed a common name for himself ; as far as the soldier in general is concerned one has usually to fall back on Tommy for want of a better, though one never feels quite comfortable in using it, as it suggests memories of patronage from papers and the I well-meaning individuals who provided free i concerts and innocuous drinks to the | soldier ; for the infantry in particular, j however the enormous impetus given to I the use of initials to indicate the thing by their constant use in reference to Army departments and offices has led to the great success of the humorous coinage P.B.I. Neither does he appear to have evolved any new generic name for his Allies- " Frenchies " and "-Belgiques " being usual terms- with one exception, which is in universal use and is one of the outstanding successes of the war. In the early spring | of 1917 there arrived on the British front the first contingents of Portuguese ; at the same period the troops were suffering from a superabundance of pork and beans, which met with immense success among our new Allies. The association of ideas thus en- gendered proved irresistible ; a highly successful parody, dealing with rations, of one of the numbers in ' Chu Chin Chow,' which was a feature of the divisional j concert party's show and in which occurred the line " Pork and beans for the Portuguese " i helped to spread the new phrase. In a i very short time the expression " Pork and I beans " to denote the Portuguese achieved j such success that the powers -that -be, i fearing it might be regarded as an insult, issued a stringent order to the effect that it and similar expressions were not to be used , as they were calculated to prejudice the good relations between ourselves and our oldest Allies. Nevertheless the phrase still lives. The following notes on words which have already appeared in the * N. & Q.' lists may be acceptable : 1. DUGOUT. In its acceptation of shel- ter this expression is certainly pre-war, but the land of its origin needs further investigation. Its use in this general sense ! in America is attested by the following quotation from Mark Twain : " We have named it Cain. She caught it . . .in the timber a couple of miles from our 'dug-out.' " (Adam's Diary: 'Next Year.') 2. WINDY. The group of expressions for fear and its manifestations centring round this word were of course extremely common during the war, but the less usual parallel series with " breeze " leads me to inquire whether there is by any chance any connexion between the modern phrase and those embodying the Elizabethan