Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/554

 456 NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s.ix. 0^.3,1921. for the French civilian, suggests the question whether there has been any similar process at work among the British troops on active France, the sudden grouping to- servce. As in gether of all sorts and conditions of men in one occupation, definitely distinct, at times almost to the point of geographical separation even within the homeland, from the remainder of the population, has re- sulted in the gradual growth of an Army slang richer and more varied than ever before, so one would at first sight expect a similar wealth of new forms and expressions in our own Army. Yet on the whole very little of the existing Army slang has found which was already considerable ; the various forms and varieties of civilian slang, chiefly, owing to the enormous fascination of the capital and the prestige of its inhabitants, those peculiar to Paris ; the languages of the troops of foreign origin with whom the French soldier came in contact, and, to a lesser degree, the varying dialects spoken among the French troops ; and, finally, most interesting of all, the numerous war-time creations, not of course in the absolute but in the relative sense fresh developments and combinations of already existing material according to the various tendencies which govern the evolution of language in general and of slang in particular. its way into print, nor does it seem to have I In our own Army the same main divisions been the subject of any serious inquiry. I are noticeable but in different proportions. Though a study of the subject from adequate j The pre-war slang, for it is not correct to say material would probably reveal a larger with Dauzat (cf. p. 20 op. cit.) that since number of expressions than one can put together from personal experience, I do not think the war slang of the Army would compare in richness with that of the poilu. If, as Niceforo maintains in his ' Genie Britain had no permanent Army, the war slang is quite a new creation, which covered a small but well-defined area, was the pro- perty, in the first place, of the old Regular Army and contained a large number of ex- de 1'Argot,' one of the distinctive features I pressioris derived from that Army's life in the of slang is the element of secrecy which ! East. For various reasons these terms have consciously or otherwise presides over its development, we may perhaps arrive at a partial explanation of the discrepancy in quantity between British and French Army slang by following a line of thought suggested by that view. In France, where compulsory service was the rule, practi- cally every man, having had a certain amount of military education, was conver- sant with the common terms of the military vocabulary ; so, when trench warfare de- veloped in the winter of 1914, bringing with it a clear distinction of front and back areas, apparently there arose a, probably largely unconscious, desire on the part of the actual combatants to show the civilian that, whatever he knew of the Army of his own day, he had yet no part in the experiences of the new warfare, and that how- ever much the soldier might be in the France of the civilian yet he was not of it. In England, on the other hand, where the majority of men were almost entirely ignorant of matters military, the technical terms themselves, being unknown, served the purpose of conveying to the civilian the impression that, while he was " out. of it," the soldier had been initiated into a new life. not always caught on in the new Armies called into being by the needs of the war, and inquiry would probably show that a larger proportion of these terms have been adopted by the Territorials who relieved the Indian garrison than by those troops who served on the Western front. Moreover, since the border-line between slang and colloquial English does not appear to be so sharply defined as that between argot and the everyday language in France, it is often extremely difficult to assign any given expression used in the Army and also used in civil life to one or other of the above categories. Further, the British cast of mind does not appear to indulge in the numerous suffix substitutions and similar deformations of words to which French slang seems prone, but to be content with the limited amount of emphasis and energy which can be obtained by the constant re- iteration of " Old Bill's " blanks ; inciden- tally, these were one cause of his popularity in the Army, because, as a " mate " of mine expressed it, "he always puts them in the right place." Again, since the military terms them- selves served very largely the purposes of The study of wartime slang in the French, slang, there was not the same impulse to Army has shown that it is derived from four j create new terms as was the case in France, well-defined sources : the pre-war Army slang, and we have here a possible explanation of