In the 19th century, dingbat was used much like thingummy (the British term for thingamajig) or whatchamacallit as a general placeholder for something or someone whose real name you can’t recall. The name was eventually taken up by troops to describe an artillery shell fitted with an impact fuse, meaning that it exploded on impact with the ground rather than in the air thereby causing the greatest amount of damage. Daisy-Cutterīefore the War, a daisy-cutter had been a cricket ball or baseball pitched low so that it practically skims along the surface of the ground. A crump-holewas the crater the shell left behind. Crump-HoleĬrump is an old English dialect word for a hard hit or blow that, after 1914, came to be used for the explosion of a heavy artillery shell.
It’s apparently derived from the coot, a species of waterfowl supposedly known for being infested with lice and other parasites. CootiesĪs a nickname for body lice or head lice, cooties first appeared in trenches slang in 1915. Calling it “one of the dirty tricks of war,” the English journalist Sir Philip Gibbs (1877-1962) ominously wrote in his day-by-day war memoir From Bapaume to Passchendaele (1918) that “the enemy left … slow-working fuses and ‘booby-traps’ to blow a man to bits or blind him for life if he touched a harmless looking stick or opened the lid of a box, or stumbled over an old boot.” 6. Booby-Trapīooby-trap had been in use since the mid-19th century to refer to a fairly harmless prank or practical joke when it was taken up by troops during the First World War to describe an explosive device deliberately disguised as a harmless object.
#Words from utterly skin#
No one is quite sure where the word comes from, although one popular theory claims that because blimps were non-rigid airships (i.e., they could be inflated and collapsed, unlike earlier rigid, wooden-framed airships), they would supposedly be listed on military inventories under the heading “Category B: Limp.” However, a more likely idea is that the name is onomatopoeic, and meant to imitate the sound that the taut skin or “envelope” of a fully inflated airship makes when flicked. BlimpĪs a military slang name for an airship, blimp dates back to 1916. A "blighty wound" or "blighty one" was an injury severe enough to warrant being sent home, the English equivalent of a German Heimatschuss, or “home-shot.” Self-inflicted blighty wounds were punishable by death, although there are no known reports of anyone being executed under the rule. It first emerged among British troops serving in India in the late 19th century, but didn’t really catch on until the First World War the Oxford English Dictionary records only one use in print prior to 1914. Blightyĭerived from vilayati, an Urdu word meaning "foreign," blighty is an old military nickname for Great Britain. In its original context, a basket case was a soldier who had been so badly injured that he had to be carried from the battlefield in a barrow or basket, usually with the implication that he had lost all four of his limbs. While it tends to be used in a fairly lighthearted way today (usually describing someone who constantly makes stupid mistakes, or who crumbles under pressure), the original basket case is an unexpectedly gruesome reminder of just how bloody the War became.
Its use is credited to an RAF pilot, Vice-Marshall Amyas Borton, who apparently had a habit of singing the song’s defiant chorus-“Archibald, certainly not! / Get back to work at once, sir, like a shot!”-as he flew his airplane between the exploding German shells on the Western Front. Apparently derived from an old music hall song called Archibald, Certainly Not!, Archie was a British military slang word for German anti-aircraft fire.
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