Oxford English Dictionary Terms

Oxford English Dictionary Terms

What do you learn about the reasons that new words come into the English language and how?

From the article I have learned that some of the new terms that we now have in the OED are as a result of borrowing, an example of this is the word cushy which means easy was borrowed from Urdu and was first used by Rudyard Kipling.

Another example is that the word cootie (meaning body louse) originated in the trenches of 1917 but research has shown that coot means “louse” and cooty means “infested with lice” which was used earlier in the war. All these terms ultimately relate to a bird called a coot that is known to be infested with lice and there is a phrase called “lousy as a coot” which dates back to the 19th Century.

Germany was largely the source of loanwords referring to weapons and vehicles such as minenwerfer.
What I found interesting in the text was that although soldiers borrowed words from Germany they mispronounced common French expressions which were informal that they picked up in the frontline.

Which words did you look up and what did they mean? How did they enter the language?

War to end all wars - A war regarded as making other wars unnecessary. It entered our language during the first world war because it was believed that this war would be the one to end all war. It was a slogan that the Allies had and had to stick to it.

Camouflage - Used to disguise or conceal an object. Many soldiers and aeroplanes etc. all used camouflage to keep them from being defeated by the enemy.

Shellshock - Is a psychosomatic disorder identified in the Soldiers of the First World War. The term coined because it is believed the disorder was caused by exposure to shell-fire and the disorder was characterised by severe anxiety attacks and nervous ticks.

Triple Entente - An informal alliance of three powers: Great Britain, France and Russia. They formed the Allied powers of the First World War.

Big Bertha - Soldiers name for a German gun used in the war of 1914 named after Madame Krupp von Bohlen.

Flanders Mud - The muddy conditions which characterise the trenches and battlefields of the First World War and it now symbolises the suffering of the soldiers. It is called Flanders mud because it is a place in Flanders. The war poem “In Flanders Fields” is set in the Flanders mud where the poppies grew which are now a flower that symbolises the Great War.

War Effort - The actions and behaviour of a nation at work. The military and civilians viewed as collectively helping out in the war especially the women how made weapons for the war whilst the men fought.

White Feather - A symbol of cowardice. During the war, white feathers were posted through the mailboxes of those men who did not enlist to help out in the war and the whole neighbourhood knew if you were not enlisted and it was done to embarrass them for not wanting to fight the good fight and die for your country.

Conscription - Compulsory for civilians to take part in the military. This had to be introduced because too many soldiers were dying and not enough people were volunteering to join so it had to be made compulsory.

Aussie - First coined for Australian Soldiers in the First World War.

Propaganda film - A film created to promote the cause of the war and to persuade more men to join the war. This was used before conscription.

Home Front - Civilians at home who took part in the war were considered as fighting on the home front by allowing their husbands and sons to go and fight the war and for creating weapons and keeping morale high.

What do you notice about how the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) editors have organised the list (look at the sub-headings, amount/range of included words etc.)?

The different sub-headings that the OED editors have used are: Names for the war, Military Strategy and Terminology, Life in the Trenches (this list is repeated twice and I’m not sure whether or not this is just a typing error or not but I think it might be an error), Domestic and Civilian Life, The War of Remembrance, The International War, Aerial Warfare, Soldiers speaking French, Military Slang and Political History.The different headings might have been used in this way to help identify which types of people at the time would have used those different terms such as the soldiers would know more of the terminology related to the lexis of warfare rather than just war like those who fight on the home front and there are also headings for different groups of words which would relate to everyone like Names for the war and other groups are likely to represent words that appeared much later like The War of Remembrance.   

What could you use this corpus (collection of words/texts) to investigate?

Using these terms that were first popularised during the first world war, it would be interesting to do an investigation using a questionnaire and asking people which terms they recognise, if they can define them and, if ever, how often do they used different terms in everyday conversation. I have come across many of these terms when I studied GCSE History so it would be interesting to see how other people have come across any terms in the list. Another possible investigation could be to look at texts that people at the time would have produced and look at the frequency in which certain words turned up such as in diary entries from civilians at the time.

What could you link this to or what did it inspire you to go off and read?

The terminology would be interesting to look at in terms of represented speech created in TV Shows or Film Scripts because they may use these terms to help portray to their audience this particular moment in history and by using the terminology coined at the time it may make the programme more realistic. It would also be good to look at if there are any times in which certain words are used in represented speech to explore why through context and to see how they are using the words and for what purpose.