Kick the Bucket and Swing the Cat: The Complete Balderdash & Piffle Collection of English Words, and Their Curious Origins by Alex Games

Author:Alex Games [Games, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language, Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics, General, Reference, English Language, Etymology, Words, Words; Language & Grammar
ISBN: 9781446415115
Publisher: BBC Digital
Published: 2016-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

The Forties

The 1940s gave us words reflecting changes that were social, technological and political. The first mobile home appeared in 1940, the Wonderbra in 1947, and the first reference to a mobile phone – which was probably the size of a phone box – appeared in 1945. In 1948, worried about television and politics of every stripe, George Orwell published his creepily powerful novel 1984. From this we got a whole raft of expressions that seem ever more relevant: Big Brother, doublethink, Room 101. The expression ‘Big Brother is watching you’ came to denote complete authoritarian control. ‘Room 101’ was the room where dissidents were taken where they were confronted with that which they most feared. ‘Doublethink’ is an axiom of Orwell’s totalitarian state, defined as ‘The mental capacity to accept as equally valid two entirely contrary opinions or beliefs.’ All these words have been appropriated in other contexts to describe suitably ‘Orwellian’ situations (such as those he might have devised) – from faceless bureaucracy to a police state.

The OED records almost three hundred new words entering the language per year during the Second World War. Many were what you might have expected from a state of war : the first malfunction happened in 1939, the first jeep appeared in 1941, as did boffin. Arty – short for ‘artillery’ – appeared in 1942, and the word genocide dates from 1944. The world’s first loud-hailer went into service in 1941, and, not entirely unconnected, the world’s first marriage guidance counsellor also dates from that year. In 1941 a sprog was army slang for a new recruit. By 1945, if the marriage guidance counsellor’s advice had helped and the marriage had survived, ‘sprog’ meant youngster, child or baby.

A 1941 travel guide to Havana contains the first reference in print to nightclubbing, and, if you could wait just one more year, the American Thesaurus of Slang records the first freebie from 1942. You might have got in had you been wearing the first zoot suit, whose existence is recorded that same year in the song of the same name by Ray Gilbert and Bob O’Brien, ‘I want a Zoot Suit with a reat pleat, with a drape shape.’ Smart casual didn’t appear until 1945, in the New York Times.

Telly, the shortened version of ‘television’, appears in print in 1942, three years before bebop (see page 216). ‘Bebop’, originally the name of a recording by jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie, was popular among teenagers, and ‘teenagers’ arrived on the pages of Popular Science Monthly in 1941, the same year that existentialism was translated into English by the philosopher Julius Kraft.

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