Dad's old tongue
By M on Sunday 18 February 2007, 00:26 - Background - Permalink
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.
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.
Comments
Definitely worth preserving! Extremely colorful...very enjoyable! Reminds me of my father's lingo, picked up in the U. S. Navy and preserved through his entire working life when he retired honorably after 20 years only to seek out a position in civil service doing much the same thing he-did-in-the-wars-daddy (including WWII and everything after, cold, warm or hot): Cryptography. Just as your father's lingo was specific to military transport, so was much of my father's (although some of it came from Crypto-lingo; that which he was allowed to repeat in unclassified company, at any rate). The childhood act of making sense of the insensible also comes back clear and strong. I'll never forget learning, after some years of misunderstanding, that "bulkhead" ISN'T the bottom of the bunk above you!
One of my sisters, who retired from the USN after 20 years, confirmed for me that, at least in her area of expertise, the lingo hadn't changed much since my father's day. Curious, considering the astonishing leaps in the sophistication of military transport and weaponry from my dad's day to hers.
I love "Stone the crows", by the way. I may adopt that one.
I am interested to learn the derivation, if any, of "stap me!"
["Bristow" fan]