Words from war

A few days ago we marked the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War on Nov. 11, 1918. The war was great only in the sense that it was big, not that it was very good. Just a few years later there was an even greater war, so now we just call it World War I. Let's hope we stop counting.

Big events often add words to our vocabulary, and that was certainly true of that war. Each fall I try to celebrate, or at least observe, the 100th anniversary of the birth of new words or expressions in the English language, and it should be no surprise that the war that finally ended in 1918 produced a number of new words, including a few that year such as buck private, D-day and recon, all words I would have expected to have come out of World War II. The word internee may also be a product of the war. The expression oo-la-la probably also resulted from the war, since we associate it with French women, and American soldiers certainly met a lot of French women during and after the war.

Jeannette Rankin

The Russian Revolution began in 1917, but not until the following year did a lot of words associated with that event find their way into the language. Consider Bolshie, Leninism, neo-Marxism and Red Army.

The election of Jeannette Rankin of Montana to Congress in 1916 led to the creation of the word congresswoman in 1918. Why it took a full year for that to happen I cannot imagine.

Here are some other useful words that sprang into existence that year: baby blues, blah, breakthrough, decertify, defeatism, defeatist, devalue, both extrovert and introvert, fadeout, force-feed, major (as a verb), maladapted, Mickey Finn, motorboating, Murphy bed, narcissistic, politicization, pre-med, roomie, rustproofing, scrimpy, shimmy, speedster, streamline (as a verb), surrealist and umpteen.

A few words coined in 1918 have all but disappeared from the language. I am speaking of farmerette Girl Guiding, Indianization and pitch-in dinner.

As always I am grateful to Sol Steinmetz and his book There's a Word for It for this little birthday party.