The ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ and the Great War

By Lawrence Biemiller. Next time you’re at the diner for breakfast, try ordering “Zeppelins in a cloud.” That’s slang for sausages and mashed potatoes, inspired by the airships used for spying and bombing during World War I, according to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. The distinctive flying machines “must have captured the imaginations of soldiers,” the editors say. But Oxford’s word sleuths have been able to trace the use of the phrase only back to 1925, when it turned up in Edward Fraser and John Gibbons’s Soldier & Sailor Words. So the OED’s lexicographers have put out an appeal to the public, asking for help in hunting down earlier uses of “Zeppelins in a cloud” and a handful of other terms “related to or coined during the war.” The Great War appeals list includes “shell shock,” “camouflage,” “trench foot,” and “demob,” along with words not often heard by modern ears: “conchie” (a conscientious objector), for instance, or “jusqu’auboutiste” (someone who fights to the bitter end, from the French “jusqu’au bout”). Another featured word, “skive” (“to avoid work”), remains in circulation in Britain but doesn’t seem to have invaded American English. More...