American Language Supplement 2 (151 page)

The precise provenance of most of the terms that issued from the war is dark and disputed. Where, how and at whose hands
GI
came into use is not known. Colby, before cited, says that in World War I, and perhaps before, the initials stood for
galvanized iron
, as in
GI
[ash]-
can
and
GI bucket
, but that they were transferred early in World War II to
general issue
, as in
GI soap, GI haircut
and
GI food
. All such things were disesteemed by the soldier, mainly because they were purely utilitarian and hence unattractive, so he presently began to transfer the letters, metaphorically, to other things that he didn’t admire,
e.g., GI hop
or
struggle
, a dance at an Army post;
GI girl
, a female brought in to dance with him;
GI war
, manoeuvres;
GI sky-pilot
, a chaplain;
GI lemonade
, water, and so on. These terms soon appeared numerously in
Yank
, the soldiers’ newspaper, and
GI Joe
, for the soldier himself, and
GI Jane
for his female comrade-in-arms, followed inevitably.
¹
But the
Joe
part was
disliked,
¹
and soon
GI Joe
became plain
GI
. The latter also had some vogue as an adjective standing alone, as in “Are they very
GI
around here?,” always expressing distaste, but it did not last for long. Neither did
GI kraut
, listed in 1945 as in use in the Army of the Occupation to designate a former private in the German Army.
²
Of
kraut
itself Irwin R. Blacker said during the same year:
³

But it was official fiat which substituted the euphemistic
selectee
for the somewhat harsh
draftee
of World War I. The former first appeared in the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, along with
trainee. Trainee
didn’t have much prosperity, but
selectee
was in almost universal use until the end of the war.
Evacuee
, which raged among the English, though it was violently denounced by their purists,
⁵
never made any progress in this country, probably because the only American citizens actually evacuated were the heathen Japanese of the Pacific Coast. Once the war was over
displaced person
, usually abbreviated to
DP
, came into use on both sides of the water.
⁶
Stateside
, in the sense of relating to or in the direction of the United States – in other words,
back home
– impinged upon the national consciousness during World War II, but
a writer in
American Notes & Queries
in 1947
¹
said that he had a vague recollection of seeing it in print “fifteen or twenty years ago, used by Americans living temporarily in United States Territories and in the Far East.”
²
The introduction of the
pin-up girl
has been claimed by Walter Thornton,
³
but he apparently did not invent the term.
⁴
Mae West
for an inflatable life-preserver used by aviators and later for a tank with two turrets, came from the English,
⁵
as did the German
blitz
and its derivatives, and
blackout
. When
blitz
began to work its way into English use, at the beginning of the war, there were many violent protests from chauvinists,
⁶
but by 1940 it had been fully accepted, along with
ersatz
and
flak
.
⁷
Whether or not these terms will survive in the language remains to be seen; probably not. In the United States they are known, but seem to be in infrequent use.

The English invented
blackout
in 1939,
⁸
but it did not cross the ocean until after Pearl Harbor.
Task-force
had to wait until the resumption of the offensive in the Pacific: it is apparently American, but who coined it I do not know.
V-day, VE-day, VJ-day
and
V-mail
also appear to be of American origin, though the terms in
-day
may have been suggested by the German
der tag
, one of the
chief proofs of German wickedness in World War I.
¹
Black market
, of course, was a legacy from that war, and was possibly borrowed from the German
Schwarzmarkt
, which preceded it.
Lend-lease
was coined by some anonymous Washington onomatologist at the time the thing itself was invented, before Pearl Harbor. The enormous number of abbreviations in use during the war,
e.g., WAC, Pfc, AMGOT
,
²
SHEAF, ETO
and
Seabee
³
began to fade the moment hostilities ended, along with the even more numerous abbreviations designating sectors of the home front, but some of them will no doubt be revived when the bugles blow again. The device of calling a military enterprise
Operation
this-or-that shows some sign of enduring.
⁴
The fate of
to liberate
I do not venture to predict. It signifies to loot and had a large vogue in the Army of Occupation in Germany,
c
. 1946, but the sentence of fifteen years at hard labor imposed upon the master-liberator, Colonel Jack W. Durant, on April 30, 1947, gave it a set-back. It has an American smack, but there is evidence that it was actually borrowed from the English.
⁵
Quisling
and its verb,
to quisling
or
to quisle
, also English loans, ran into difficulties on September 8, 1943, when Marshal Pietro
Badoglio
came over to the allies, though his country was still at war, and the English papers began to use
badoglio
, a surrender to the enemy.
⁶

Jeep
seems to be authentically American, but the history of the
word is almost as obscure as the history of the car itself. The latter was apparently first projected by Captain (later Colonel) R. G. Howie, then in command of the Seventh Tank Company at Fort Snelling, Minn., in 1932. He continued his experiments during the three years following, and in 1936 was given a small grant from Army funds by Major-General Walter C. Short. At the beginning of 1937, assisted by Master Sergeant M. J. Wiley, he began assembling the first car, and during the Autumn of that year it was completed and sent to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, for trials. They brought in favorable reports from the Army bigwigs there assembled, headed by Major-General (later Lieutenant-General) Walter Krueger, and a year later Short sought to keep the invention an American monopoly by applying for a patent on it, in his own name and those of Howie and Wiley.
¹
But the
jeep
, so far, was a rather primitive contrivance, and its operator had no seat, but was supposed to lie upon it belly-whopper fashion. In the developments which followed various other persons had some hand, and also different manufacturers,
e.g
., the Willys-Overland Motors of Toledo, the American Bantam Car Company of Butler, Pa., and the Minneapolis-Moline Power Implement Company. Indeed, there were so many fingers in the pie that after the
jeep
was adopted by the Army and became a vast success, conflicting claims of interest produced a controversy before the Federal Trade Commission,
²
and it dragged on wearily.

The first batch of seventy
jeeps
was produced by the Bantam Car Company in 1940, and delivered to the Army Quartermaster Depot at Holabird, Md., on September 23 of that year.
³
They were given
thorough tests there and at other Army posts, and it was soon resolved to order them in large quantities. It was by then apparent that the United States would soon be in the war, and the fear that the Bantam Company might not be able to produce the new cars fast enough caused the Army to let contracts for them to other companies, including Ford. The fact that the code symbol of Ford on Army cars was
GP
has led to the surmise that the word
jeep
was born there and then,
¹
but there is no evidence for it. Nor is there any evidence that the word came from the same letters in the sense of
general purpose
, for the first
jeeps
were not called, officially,
general purpose cars
, but
half-ton four by four command-reconnaissance cars
.
²
It seems to be much more probable that the name was borrowed from that of a character in E. C. Segar’s comic strip, “Popeye the Sailor,” which also gave the language
goon
. Eugene the
Jeep
appeared in Segar’s drawings on March 16, 1936, and on April 1 of that year the King Features Syndicate, which syndicated his work, took steps to protect both the name and the character. Segar dropped both before his death in 1938, but they had caught the public fancy and survived him.
³
Who first applied
jeep
to the new Army car is not known, but a claim has been made for a Sergeant James T. O’Brien.
⁴
Inasmuch however, as this baptism is dated 1937, when the car was still in its early experimental stage, the evidence seems to be shaky, but there is evidence that an Oklahoma manufacturer named Erle Palmer Halliburton gave the name to a different car, half truck and half tractor, during the same year.
⁵

The fact is that, at that time,
jeep
was in the air, and many other contrivances were so called,
e.g
., the Link Trainer for aviators. Colby says that it was also applied to a recruit, to ill-fitting hats and coats, and to various other objects.
⁶
At one time an autogiro was a
jumping jeep
, and the barracks where recruits were quartered was a
jeep-town
. In 1938 Jerome Barry reported that
jeep
was
then in use among soda-jerkers to designate a slow and incompetent colleague,
¹
and in 1940 a writer in the Baltimore
Evening Sun
said that it was used among automobile finance men for “one who rides with the adjuster in order to drive back the cars repossessed.”
²
The English, during World War II used it for a radio operator and also for a member of the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve.
³
In the sense of a bantam car it once had many rivals,
e.g., blitz-buggy
,
⁴
baby-buggy, bug, gnat-tank, scout-car, leaping Lena, puddle-jumper, jeepers-creepers, midget, midgie, quad
and plain
bantam-car. Peep
was invented to differentiate the half-ton car from a quarter-ton model.
⁵
Jeep
quickly passed into most of the European languages. “No Frenchman, Belgian, Dutchman, Luxemburger, Dane, Norwegian or German, and very few Poles or Russians,” says Bishop, before cited, “is ignorant of
OK, GI
or
jeep
.”
⁶

The English apparently preferred the
European War
as a designation for the conflict of 1914–18, but in the United States it came to be known as the
World War
, and when another round began in 1939 it naturally became
World War II
. But there were poets who groped for something less prosaic, and one of them was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. So late as the Spring of 1942 he was calling for suggestions, and many flowed in. The Hon. Thomas E. Dewey proposed the
War for Survival
, Mrs. Anne M. Rosenberg
Freedom’s War
, Dr. William Lyon Phelps the
War of Liberty
, the Hon. Henry H. Curran the
Necessary War
, and Jack Dempsey the
Fight to Live
. The Hon. Emil Schram, president of the New York Stock Exchange, put his hopes into the
Last World War
, and other less eminent persons contributed the
War to Save Humanity
, the
Fight for Right
, the
War to Save Civilization
, the
War of the Ages
, the
People’s War
, the
Survival War
, the
War of World Freedom
, the
War Against Tyrants
, the
Hitler War
, and the
World Order
War
. There were even cynics who proposed the
Crazy War
, the
War of Illusions
, the
Meddler’s War
, the
Roosevelt War
, the
Devil’s War
, and
Hell
. How and by whom the votes were counted I do not know, but when the uproar was over it was announced that
World War II
had won by a large plurality, with
War of World Freedom
a bad second, and
War of Freedom
a worse third. Soon after Pearl Harbor, in fact, the Army and Navy had adopted
World War II
, and by the middle of 1942 it was appearing in the
Congressional Record
. By the end of that year it had obliterated all the other proposed names, and prophets were already beginning to talk hopefully of
World War III
.

Ernest K. Lindley and Forrest Davis say in “How War Came”
¹
that
United Nations
was coined by President Roosevelt. This was during Winston Churchill’s visit to Washington at the end of December, 1941. He was a guest at the White House, and he and Roosevelt discussed the choice of a name for the new alliance. One morning, lying in bed, Roosevelt thought of
United Nations
, and at once sought Churchill, who was in his bath. “How about
United Nations?”
he called through the door. “That,” replied Churchill, “should do it.” And so it was.