It occurred to me the other day that I have grown up exposed to a rare and transient form of English: Wartime RAF slang. Although the war finished in 1945, my dad stayed in the aviation business, both military and civil, along with many other ex-RAF bods (which was their word for people, literally 'bodies'), and so he continued to feel the mutual reinforcement of such slang for many years into peacetime.

If something had been destroyed or broken beyond repair it had 'gone for a burton'. Or it might be 'US', unserviceable. If so, there was no point 'getting in a flap' - getting anxious or hysterical - or 'browned off' (fed up) about it. It was better to just 'press on regardless', an RAF motto adopted for life thereafter by dad. Alternatively, one could have a 'shufti' (a look) at the 'gubbins' (the insides, of an engine, for example). Better to see for yourself rather than rely on 'duff gen' (bad information). All these terms pervaded my childhood, and there was not a situation of any description, be it political, social, technical, legal - you name it - that was not an exact homologue of some aspect of dealing with aircraft engines, according to dad.

He had some other idiosyncratic phrases: 'little tiny' was always used in place of little. There was also the word Bonzo - a term of endearment to his sons - which puzzles me still. He was fond of talking about dynafocal mounted elbows (either an imaginary device or a bizarre medical condition) to confuse people. He also had an involuntary reflex that I found rather annoying: mention a temperature in Celsius, for example, and he would quickly tell you what it was in Fahrenheit. The same for pounds and kilos, miles and kilometres, pints and litres. The pointlessness of it, and its predictability, used to exasperate me terribly. I wonder why now.

However, it was in the expression of surprise that dad really had a full vocabulary. On being told that there was, let's say, a lion in the front garden, he would exclaim any or all of the following:

Stap me!
Blimey!
Crikey!
Stone the crows!
Strewth!
Love a duck!

I've found that one of these terms (blimey) has embedded itself deep in my idiolect, despite my attempts to speak a generic English easily understood by multi-national audiences. I wonder how this now out-of-favour word is perceived by the generation X, Y, Next or whatever we are up to now. I wonder if it has the same anachronistic sound as 'Zounds' or 'Toodle-pip' had for me when I was a callow youth?

Dad's language, of course, is dying with his generation, just as it will for all of us. Just thought it might be worth preserving a few samples against that day.