Something Rhymes with Purple - Bazooka

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

This week, we traverse the lexicon landscape of the Second World War, unearthing the hidden treasures of word origins. Join us as Susie & Gyles unveil the remarkable tales behind wartime vocabulary, and reveal the extraordinary evolution of words shaped by the tumultuous era. We love hearing from you, find us @SomethingRhymes on Twitter and Facebook, @SomethingRhymesWith on Instagram or you can email us on our NEW email address here: [e-mail] Want even more purple, people? Join the Purple Plus Club by clicking the banner in Apple podcasts or head to purpleplusclub.com to listen on other platforms' Enjoy Susie’s Trio for the week:  Niminy piminy: Feeble Scringe: To screw up the face Slapsauce: A glutton Gyles' poem this week was 'Slough' by John Betjeman Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now, There isn't grass to graze a cow. Swarm over, Death! Come, bombs and blow to smithereens Those air -conditioned, bright canteens, Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, Tinned minds, tinned breath. Mess up the mess they call a town- A house for ninety-seven down And once a week a half a crown For twenty years. And get that man with double chin Who'll always cheat and always win, Who washes his repulsive skin In women's tears: And smash his desk of polished oak And smash his hands so used to stroke And stop his boring dirty joke And make him yell. But spare the bald young clerks who add The profits of the stinking cad; It's not their fault that they are mad, They've tasted Hell. It's not their fault they do not know The birdsong from the radio, It's not their fault they often go To Maidenhead And talk of sport and makes of cars In various bogus-Tudor bars And daren't look up and see the stars But belch instead. In labour-saving homes, with care Their wives frizz out peroxide hair And dry it in synthetic air And paint their nails. Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough To get it ready for the plough. The cabbages are coming now; The earth exhales. A Sony Music Entertainment production.   Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts     To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail]  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of our podcast. It's all about words and language and it features me, Giles Branruth, and my friend and in my view the world's leading lexicographer, Susie Dent. How did you get into lexicography, Susie? I think I got into lexicography in the loosest sense when I went to work for Oxford University Press, OUP, who are publishers of the Oxford dictionaries and the most amazing place, really,

with vast teams of people working on these dictionaries. So I went there and worked on bilingual dictionaries, French and German, Spanish, etc., and then came to English quite late. But I think words found me a long time before then, Giles. I always, as you know, stared at ketchup bottles. Anything with the printed word upon it has always had some sort of magical allure for me.

And yeah, right from one of my earliest memories was sitting in the bath looking at bottles. So you have no regrets about giving your life to the world of words? Oh, none. None, none, none. No. That's a lovely thing to feel, isn't it? I feel very blessed for that. Well, it is interesting. You will find this hard to believe, but I went through a phase when I was a teenager of thinking I wanted to be a soldier. And anybody less soldier-like than me is hard to imagine. Of course, I didn't think I'd be a soldier, you know, fighting in the front line. I thought I'd be doing sort of security work, undercover operations. That was my idea of being a soldier. And I think I thought that because

my father talked a bit about his experiences during the Second World War. Did your father do national service? He did. He was in the RAF and he went to work. I think we've talked about this before on the pod. He worked in Gibraltar as an air traffic controller, which is a fairly hairy place for an air traffic controller, I have to say. But yeah, and he loved it actually. But it's one of those things, isn't it, where I think many people wish that they had asked more questions. isn't it, where I think many people wish that they had asked more questions. And yeah, I wish I had about his time there. But he was also quite reticent about it too. So people are reticent, people were reticent, particularly about the Second World War. Yeah, he was after that, I should say. Of course he was. Of course, absolutely. And I know about Gibraltar,

we did talk about it before, because I remember saying how whenever I've been to Gibraltar, how alarming it is, because the aeropl airplane sort of lands literally over the main road. Yeah. They close the road to the airport so that the airplanes can land at the airport. The reason I was going to talk about the Second World War is, as I think I may have mentioned, I recently read a book called Looking for Trouble by Virginia Cowles. read a book called Looking for Trouble by Virginia Cowles. And she was a war correspondent, an American, but based in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. And she wrote a remarkable book, which has recently been reprinted by Faber. It was first published during the Second World War.

And it was an account of, first of all, the Spanish Civil War, and then the early years of the Second World War. And it is extraordinary. It's very vivid. It's very alarming. And it has remarkable echoes those times with currently what we see on television with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So we thought today we'd talk a little bit about World War II, or was it the Second World War? Which would you refer to it as? I think now I would say the Second World War, and I had it in my mind, and we were talking about this in the two minutes before we came on air, so to speak. I had it in my mind that Star Guides now recommend the Second World War, but looking it up, it seems the Americans prefer, in American English, World War II, and we prefer the Second World War. It's interesting. My parents sometimes gave the impression that the Second World War was, in a way, the happiest time of their lives, which seems very odd. And I remember discussing

this with the psychiatrist, Dr. Anthony Clare. And I said to him, why would this be? My mother, during the Second World War, she lived in London with my older sisters. They were about 10 years older than me. They were little babies. But bombs were falling near the flat where she lived. And my father, for six years during the Second World War, he was in the army all over the place and risking his life. I said, why did they talk about the Second World War as occasionally, as a happy time? And he, Dr. Clare, said, oh, that's easy to explain. People like your mother,

yes, bombs were falling. But there was a sense of community in London, a sense of shared values, common fighting spirit. And that sense of community makes people quite happy. And yes, of course, your father, the soldiers, the sailors, the airmen and women, but mostly airmen, soldiers and sailors, they were risking their lives on a regular basis during the Second World War. But also, they were being tested. And all the research shows, he said to me, that being tested is a key element to finding happiness. Isn't that strange? You don't often find people sitting around not doing very much who are happy.

Ah, that's become your life ethos, hasn't it? Because you never sit around not doing very much. Well, it has. And of course, I mean, the Second Worldos, hasn't it? Because you never sit around not doing very much. Well, it has. And of course, I mean, the Second World War, you can hardly imagine anything more testing. And I've also been reading recently the diaries, as I know I've mentioned, of Chips Tannen. And reading a diary of the Second World War is interesting because at the time of writing,

the author of the diary doesn't know what's going to happen next, doesn't know what the outcome is going to be. But it's interesting what you're saying about finding actually the community spirit and almost enjoying those years as really happy ones. But I think many of us actually felt that guilt during the pandemic, didn't we, that we actually quite liked being sort of shut inside and spending time with family and the slight lifting of one category of stresses. I know we had a whole different one on our shoulders. But a lot of us, you and I included, felt quite guilty, didn't we, about the fact that actually it was quite a nice time, particularly at the beginning.

I don't think I felt guilty, but I certainly relished it. I loved those walks that we were encouraged to do. And also the weather helped. It did. It was beautiful. And I managed to write a book and there was a kind of freedom. Of course, not if you were at the front line, actually working in the health service. And not if you were vulnerable or anything. So we were very lucky from that point of view. Vulnerable. Oh, indeed, you know, one of the people who actually lost their lives during it.

And people, I mean, so many people lost their lives during the Second World War. Let's explore some of the language of war, because you've told me before that these wars, whether it's the Napoleonic War, the Crimean War, the First World War, now sometimes known as the Great War, or indeed the Second World War, brought words into the language. The very fact of war brings vocabulary, brings new vocabulary. Is that true? Yes. And it's a strange irony, isn't it? So for all their destruction, actually, they do generate new things and particularly new vocabulary. And it's from quite a breadth of areas, a wide breadth of areas, really, because we have technological innovation, which, of course, then requires a vocabulary. You have organisational

innovation because people have to come together to form, whether it's at the front line to form new units or whether it's actually committees or task forces or whatever. So there's that side of things. And then there's also the experiences, the emotional experiences that people go through, that also requires some kind of articulation. So strangely, wars are very, very generative of new words. Before we get into the specifics of new words that came from the Second World War or World War II, that conflict between 1939 and 1945-46, tell me about the origin of the word war, W-A-R. Where does that come from? Oh yes, that's interesting because the Latin for war was bellum, which gave us bellicose, which is to be aggressive and sort of warlike. But war is from the Anglo-Norman hybrid that we came up with, having taken the French guerre,

so G-U-E-R-R-E. But what is really interesting about that old French guerre is that it's actually a relative of worse. So guerre itself is of Germanic origin, and it meant not just war, but also confusion and sort of discord. And if you take it back far enough, it's from the same family as worse, which makes sense, obviously, because war inevitably makes things worse, you know, in the short term, no matter what the long-term objectives are. Well, that's war. We come to the Second World War. One of the great horrors of all history has to be the Holocaust. Now, that's a word that we associate with the horrors of the Second World War, but I imagine it's an older word. It is. It's interesting, isn't it, also how

war can flip things or take things that actually, but that's sort of very general, and I suppose it gives them specific senses. So I'm thinking here of things like Ground Zero, which is very much related to war, now absolutely focused on 9-11 and what happened there, the terrible events that happened there in New York City. But actually, Ground Zero before then was the site of any nuclear blast that had quite a general meaning and then really focused on that. And it's the same with Holocaust. So Holocaust means in a more general sense, destruction on a mass scale. And originally, it was especially caused by fire. And that gives you a hint as to its etymology, because it goes back to the Greek holocauston, which actually was a sacrificial offering that was burned on an altar.

So the holos means whole, as in the hologram, and the costos meant burned. But obviously, the great slaughter sense was then transferred to the mass murder of more than 6 million Jews and other persecuted groups under the Nazis. So horrific. It is. Now, give us some of the words that come to mind when you think of words that we didn't have before the Second World War. I mean, ones that come straight to my mind are Jeep, which I always seemed to think was a general purpose vehicle,

an American word, and radar, which I felt was an acronym. But I know there are scores more. Start whenever you want. Yeah, so Jeep, absolutely right, is from the initials JP, standing for general purpose, because it was a small, sturdy vehicle, especially one used by the military. But it was influenced very much. Now, I don't remember this character, but you might, Giles. We both loved Popeye, didn't we? Yes.

But I think, I'm not sure if this person, this character was transferred over into the televisation of Popeye, which is what I remember. But in the comic strip, there was someone called Eugene the Jeep. Oh, and I don't remember this character at all. No. No. So he was, or he or it, was a creature, apparently, that was incredibly resourceful and also quite powerful and that definitely influenced the change from GP to Jeep with as I say a riff on general purpose so that one's quite interesting but yeah I'm sure there are purple people that remember Eugene the Jeep and they can let us know about them radar absolutely right it's an acronym and it is from Radio Detection and Ranging.

So the opening letters of that, and it was coined in 1941, essentially. So do you remember also there was, during the Second World War, there was a myth that the British pilots ate lots of carrots to help them see in the dark. Do you remember that? I don't remember that. Oh, so this was a myth to explain how pilots could detect enemy planes because radar was still a secret. So they basically propagated this idea that they ate lots of carrots

and the vitamin A and the beta carotene actually really helped them see in the dark, which is why to this day, parents will say, oh, eat your carrots, they'll help you see in the dark. But yeah, not strictly speaking. And I remember also being told by a scientist that the fact that spinach and iron go together,

again, definitely the result of Popeye, who would just devour cans of spinach, that all went back to the misplacing of a decimal point in terms of the amount of iron that was available from one leaf of spinach, that all went back to the misplacing of a decimal point in terms of the amount of iron that was available from one leaf of spinach. So of course there's iron in spinach, as there is in all dark leafy vegetables, but it was a bit of a myth, that one, that grew up around that. Oh, that is funny, because certainly in the 1950s, when I was a little boy, I was encouraged to eat spinach and carrots. Carrots to improve my sight in the dark,

and spinach to make me strong like Popeye. Yeah. I always had a thing about olive oil and I know Popeye did too. Oh, but speaking of radar, going back to that. Yes. We, there was also LIDAR,

I don't quite know how you pronounce it actually, L-I-D-A-R, which works like radar, but uses light from lasers and laser itself is an acronym do you know what that stands for no light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation well there you go there you go so yeah radar is a really interesting one just but i love it just because of that um you know carrot myth i'm assuming bazooka is not an acronym uh bazooka no i just remember

bazooka bubblegum do you remember that no oh i love it anyway bazooka a short-range tubular rocket launcher that was used against tanks now this is a strange one because it can also mean a kazoo the musical instrument that is shaped like a trumpet but i don't quite know why that was applied to the rocket launcher or indeed which came first but yes and also there's a slang sense of bazooka as well isn't there rather vulgar yes as in magnificent bazookas bazookas yeah and i actually do you know what i'm going to look that up because I'm just wondering if that's Cockney rhyming slang. I doubt it is. Oh. But I don't know. No, it can't be. I'm looking it up in the OED.

So, okay, so the bazooka, first of all, is a trombone-like instrument. And then, that's 1935. And then, during the Second World War, in War Illustrated from 1943, it is a tubular anti-tank rocket launcher. But interestingly, the oed does not mention the breast sense how interesting but it's not been fully updated that entry so watch this space well it needs to be updated because yeah probably nowadays that's the best known use of the word bazooka yeah i'm as you can hear from my keyboard i I'm... Checking out your bazookas. No, I'm not.

I'm just checking them out online. No, nobody seems to be mentioning this. We've suddenly gone very coy. Isn't that weird? It will be in the Urban Dictionary, surely. Well, check it out. Otherwise, it's all over the world. They'll be writing to us about their bazookas.

It won't give us the etymology, I'm sure. Yeah, so that is definitely in there, but it doesn't say where it comes from okay so we're not imagining it but um yeah i'll check it out with the oed in a slightly awkward email also it is yes actually i mean i assumed the bazookas as in the breasts came from the the rocket launchers but maybe it comes from that musical instrument that predates the rocket launchers so the rocket launchers, but maybe it comes from that musical instrument that predates the rocket launchers. So the rocket launchers were named after the instrument. Yeah, absolutely. I'm not going to ask how you get from the rocket launcher to the boops, but anyway, moving swiftly on. Moving swiftly on. Yes. Give us some more. Yes. So have you heard of the word a quizzling? I have heard of a quizzling. So you will know about this man, won't you?

Well, no. Tell us more. Tell us what you know about him. But I do know a Quisling was a kind of treacherous figure. Yeah. So in 1940, a man who was pretty much known as a quiet dreamer actually changed the course pretty much of the Second World War. So he was a Norwegian called Vidkun Quisling. And he had spent 12 years in the Soviet Union and he had originally had a firm allegiance to communism but actually that began to fade and it inspired well so he was inspired instead by the desire to set up a right-wing political party in his own country in Norway. So in 1939 he held secret talks with Adolf Hitler and he asked the Germans to support a coup d'etat in order to help his Quisling's National Union Party assume power Hitler actually refused but his own army went on to occupy Norway and after that he did eventually reinstate Quisling as a sort of puppet leader. So Quisling then became enshrined in the history books as the archetypal traitor to his country.

And then he proclaimed his innocence to the end, I think, but that didn't really wash and he was executed by firing squad at the end of the war. But Quisling today means somebody who betrays their own country by collaborating with the enemy. Hitler, of course, known as the Führer. And the Führer means leader. What does it mean? Yeah, absolutely. Simple as that. And that's an old German word, but it became, I mean, it's now attributed to when people, you describe anyone who thinks of themselves as a leader in an unpleasant way as a Führer.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And of course, inevitably, we adopted lots and lots of German terms. I mean, I think the British soldiers and maybe the American soldiers as well would call the Germans Fritz, wouldn't they? Just taking any generic first name. Yes, that I think goes back to the First World War. Oh, does it?

Okay. Well, I don't know. I'm just, I imagine it does. You might be right, actually. Let me look it up. Yeah, it's interesting because we talk now about something being, well, we used to, something being on the fritz, and that was during the First World War. And if something was on the fritz, that was an allusion to cheap German imports into the

US. But yes, you're right. Especially soldier in the First World War often used as a nickname for a German. You're absolutely right. And that course is from Friedrich. And I imagine the First World War also gave us Tommy as a nickname for British soldiers.

Yes, Tommy Atkins, wasn't it? And we got a Panzer, which was a German armoured unit. And that comes from the German Panzer, which means a coat of mail, coat of armour. We got Blitzkrieg as well. You know, that too had been around for a little while, but that is very much associated with the Second World War.

And that means lightning war in Germany. So that's an intense military campaign. Blitz means lightning. The word blitz means lightning in German. Yes, Donner and Blitzen famously. Yeah, so, you know, and we have Luftwaffe, of course, which is, you know, none of these, of course, to the British mind are associated with anything other than destruction. But of course, they were quite generic German terms before then. But Luftwaffe means air weaponry, really. So they were the German Air Force. And yeah, so inevitably those tended to come in. And of course, Nazi itself is from the German Nationalsozialistischen.

We still use the phrase kamikaze, don't we? Is that as in the kamikaze pilots who were sent on suicide missions? They were Japanese. It's a Japanese word. Yeah. Does that date from the Second World War? Yes, it does. So those were Japanese aircraft that were loaded with explosives

and then made a deliberate, well, suicidal crash really, didn't they, on enemy targets. So kamikaze actually goes back to kami in Japanese means divinity and kaze was wind. So it was a divine wind. And Kaza was wind. So it was a divine wind. And the reason for that is it referred originally to the gale that in Japanese tradition really destroyed the fleet of invading Mongols in 1281. So a divine wind came in and saved them all from this invasion. And for some reason, the pilot of a kamikaze aircraft would seem to have the same benevolent and, you know, force and a saving force. They were saviours in their eyes as that divine wind. It's a strange one. It's so horrific, all this, you know, thinking about war, seeing war

on our television screens is so horrific. Thinking about the Second World War, the First World War, known as the war to end all wars, it never did. Wars have been with us for thousands of years. Am I right that in the Second World War, the prefix mega came in, talking about mega bombs? Or have I invented that? No, it does come from the measurement of bombs. So one megaton is one million tons of TNT. So I'm just going to look at the first reference to that in the OED, see where that gets us. But yeah, it's interesting because now mega is just applied. Oh, that's really mega. It's used on its own as well as a prefix, isn't it? It is.

So mega, chiefly as an intensifier in slang. That dates back to actually 1966 and as a combining form or a prefix, ultimately from the ancient Greek. And yeah, used in lots and lots of different ways, actually, from the 17th century, etc. But I think in terms of it meaning very large, it's very old. But in terms of a kind of, you know, specific scientific sense, it probably does go back to that bomb making, which is, yeah, again, not particularly nice. But we, I mean, life changed, didn't it, under the war? And so many, so many words. There was a lovely book published while I worked at AUP, actually, called 20th Century Words, which was written by John Ato. And he looked at every single decade of the 20th century. It came out, as you would expect, in the year 2000. And they're just

lovely snapshots, really, of what were going on at the time. So Doodlebug came about in 1944. So that was the nickname applied to the German pilotless plane. And my mum, who was very young at the time, talks about the horrible sound of the Doodlebug, and that you just basically had to panic when you heard it stop, or the noise stop. Do your parents talk about those? Yes, my mother might have talked about the doodlebugs. My father's best story of the Second World War was when he was in North Africa and had a problem with a tooth. And he was pleased to discover there were dentists still practicing during the war in North Africa. He went to a

dentist, and the dentist said, you have to have your tooth removed. And my father swore this was true. The dentist attached a piece of thread to my father's tooth and the other end of the piece of thread to the door knob. To the door. Yeah. And then slammed the door shut and out came the tooth. That was a traditional. I mean, some people say they still do that because going to the dentist is too expensive.

I can't think of anything worse. But Doodle Bug first recorded from 1944. And the first record in the OED is from The Times, the 22nd of June. And it was a newspaper article, I think, that says the first fighter pilot to shoot down what the RAF men call a doodlebug was Flight Sergeant Morris Rose of Glasgow. And then you have the Home Guard. So, yeah, to meet the threat of invasion, that was 1940. That we still feel we know about because of the David Croft television series, Dad's Army, which is repeated endlessly, but it's still, gosh, it still rings true.

Oh, don't tell him, Pike. Yes. The Bevan boys. So these were conscripted coal miners, weren't they, named after Ernest Bevan, who was the Minister of Labour. You have the Clippies, female bus conductors in 1941. So there was no more manning of the buses. These were women who were working on them. And they clipped your tickets. That's why they were so cool. They clipped your tickets, exactly. We had Make Do and mend. You see, that dates back to 1944. So that, again, is just a very simple snapshot, isn't it, of what people had to do. There was rationing as well. So we've got luncheon meat.

That's from 1945. Walton pie. Have you ever had a Walton pie? I have had a Walton pie. You've never had it? That was the name of the minister, wasn't it? Who was, I suppose, the minister for food, who recommended this pie, which was full of sort of scraps and leftovers. Yes. Is that right?

Absolutely. Vegetable pie, I think, mostly. Turnips. Turnips. There's a bit of resonance with some current politicians who have pretty much said let them eat turnips but let's not go there so the walton pie is actually quite relevant etymologically speaking because pie if you remember that the pies we eat are named after the magpies because the magpies collect these random objects that's the sort of the lovely story behind them is that magpies will swoop on anything shiny and then take these trinkets back to their nest well this habit of filching and pilfering gave us the pie, which have all sorts of odds and ends and miscellaneous items in them,

just like you might find in a magpie's nest. Shall we take a break? Now, having had that lovely, happy, uplifting story about the pie, I found some of the discussion of the war rather depressing, whereas the pie at least has lifted the spirits. Good. Wherever you're going, you better believe American Express will be right there with you. Heading for adventure? We'll help you breeze through security. Meeting friends a world away? You can use your travel credit. Squeezing every drop out of the last day how about a 4 p.m late checkout you just need a nice place to settle in enjoy your room upgrade wherever you go we'll go together that's the powerful backing of american express visit amex.ca slash ymx benefits vary by card terms apply

hi i'm jesse tyler ferguson host of the podcast dinners on me i take some of my favorite people out to dinner including yes my Modern Family co-stars, like Ed O'Neill. I had friends in organized crime. Sofia Vergara. Why do you want to be comfortable? Julie Bowen. I used to be the crier.

And Aubrey Anderson-Emmons. I was so down bad for them at one Miranda when I was like eight. You can listen to Dinners On Me wherever you get your podcasts. We've talked before quite often, actually, certainly in our live shows, and I think also we brought this in quite often, phrases like gone for a Burton, which began as RAF slang,

gremlins as well, which... Gone for a Burton was meaning going to the tailor's Burton. You got a discharge money, is that right? To buy yourself a suit? No, gone for a Burton, if you remember, is a nod to Burton upon Trent, which was the centre of a lot of beer manufacture. And the idea is if the pilot had gone for a Burton, they had gone into the drink, which is very sad. So yeah, they had crashed into the sea. So that one's a bit dark, I have to say. We also have gremlins. I think

a gremlin was certainly used by pilots, including during the Second World War. It may even have come out, actually, emerged during the Second World War. But a gremlin was some component, some invisible component in an aircraft's engine or, you know, flight deck that actually was causing problems. And it was always described to this sort of mischievous little imp that was tinkering around in there. So there's, you know, RAF slang, if we devoted a whole episode to that, we should do because there's a lot in there. But inevitably, again, you know, once people come together in a really tight community, as they did during the Second World War, then a new language emerges just within that community. It's a new kind of tribal slang. And they talked about angels, which were the height above ground. They talked about

bandits, which were the hostile aircraft. Stoogeing, which I quite like, which means flying aimlessly. They would say get weaving, which means to start really briskly. They talk about shaky-doos, start really briskly uh they talk about shaky do's which were close shaves um prangs for the crashes and tail end charlie's and you know what tail end charlie's were well people right at the end but yeah rear gunners essentially oh i see the people in the airplanes were known as tail end charlie is the person who were right at the back who was firing the guns out of the rear of the airplane yeah gosh so the kind of stress and the comradeship of war, really, you know, what I think John Nader called it, whistling in the face of adversity. That's, you know, you can feel that rippling through a lot of the vocabulary that emerged

as well. Yeah. They were heroic people, the people on the right side. And, you know, probably the people on the wrong side. Many of them were heroic, too, in their own way. Oh, dear. Oh, absolutely. I mean, absolutely.

You only have to, you know, think about Christmas Day and then sort of, you know, I never quite know how romanticised this is, but, you know, people often talk, don't they, about the truce. This is a First World War story, isn't it? Did they not do that during the Second World War as well? Obviously the trenches were... I totally associate it with the First World War, and the people on the enemy lines coming up and

having a truce and playing football in no man's land between the two lots of trenches. I just think that that makes me so sad, in a way, as well as happy. Do you know what I mean? It's a merry-go-sorrow type situation. Oh, that's a great expression. Merry-go-sorrow. sorrow type oh that's a good expression merry go sorrow merry go sorry or merry go sorrow yes it's um life is one big merry go sorrow really it just means it goes goes round and round and you get joy and you get sadness and you get joy joy well i think that's a very good word to end on our little discussion of the second world war with echoes of the first world war and all other walls within it merry go sorrow that's what life is all about but something rhymes with purple is all about with echoes of the First World War and all other walls within it. Merry-go-sorrow.

That's what life is all about. But Something Rhymes with Purple is all about the purple people, and they get in touch with us. And if you want to get in touch with us, with recollections of your parents or grandparents and their wartime lingo, you just communicate with us. It's purplepeopleatsomethingrhymes.com if you want to send us an email.

It's a new email address, purplepeopleatsomething at something rhymes.com if you want to send us an email it's a new email address purple people at something rhymes.com now have we had messages this week we have and the first one is our very it's a very relevant one actually because um i work on a program called countdown as many of the purple people might know and one of the things that our erstwhile presenter Anne Robinson used to get really irked by is people saying, I was sat. I was sat reading a book. No, no, it was I was sitting. And this is what this one is about. It comes in from Suzanne, who says, I'm increasingly baffled at the changing nature of the past tenses of the verb stand and sit. It seems most people now say, I was sat on my own rather say I was sat on my own

rather than I was sitting on my own. Also, I was stood waiting there instead of I was standing there waiting. My question is, am I correct? If not, when did these verbs change? Does this irk you, Giles? Well, it used to irk me until you told me that Shakespeare did this. So that I changed my view because anything that Shakespeare does is all right in my book. Oh, well, actually, we've been doing it for a very long time. But I have to say that it has been regarded pretty much as non-standard or dialectal use. That's the label that you will find in the Oxford English Dictionary. So yes, we have been doing it for a long time, but it hasn't really become standard. But it is being noted as something that is very much on the increase. So yes, you will find in Shakespeare's lover's complaint in the sonnets,

he again desires her being sat, you will find. But actually, some of the first references go back even before then to the 15th century. So yeah, it says in the 19th and 20th centuries, regional and non-standard but increasingly common but recorded since middle english so that's sat and the same to be stood you will find exactly the same note there that it's regional and non-standard but that it's definitely on the increase and the first reference we have there is a bit later 1860 in a report on the commissioner's corrupt practices at the Gloucester election,

someone says, I was stood at the door smoking a pipe along with a friend I knew from Birmingham. So, Suzanne, I can say it's been around for a very long time. I would say most teenagers now would say I was sat rather than I was sitting. That's from my experience anecdotally. And it's definitely on the rise. And at some point, it might pivot and we might go back to where we were, or actually, it might become seen as being a standard and actually then be recorded in the dictionary as such. So it's just a question of evolution, but I understand how it does get on some people's nerves. Paul Doudash, that's not my reaction to what you're just saying. That's what I think you want to talk about next. Yes, a lot of people ask me about words for

nonsense, you know, and there are fantastic synonyms for something that is nonsense. So something might be flim flam, it might be codswallop, it might be balductum. I mean, there's a lot of old synonyms in the historical thesaurus for a load of old tripe, and balderdash is one of them. And a lot of them go back to food and unappetizing food. So we talked about the pie and all the different ingredients going in there. Wait till you hear about balderdash. So in Shakespeare's time, you will find balderdash not referring to rubbish, as we would do it today, but as an unappetising, frothy liquid. And that liquid in question might contain milk mixed in with beer. There are some recipes recorded that include quicklime and, wait for it, pigeons' dung.

Actually, do pigeons produce dung? Probably poo. And so you can see from that how this meaning of sort of some vile, horrible detritus came in. And from there, the metaphorical sense of, as I say, a load of old rubbish. Good. Well, if anybody's got queries that they want to have unravelled by Susie, you know where we are. Purple people at somethingrhymes.com. every week, Susie, are three interesting words or phrases that once were commonplace, but now aren't and you'd like to see them revived. Yes, not all commonplace, I have to say. So I do occasionally select words that didn't really have much of a time, even in their day. I just like the sound of the trio today. So I'm going to start with a word that many people recognise. And I

think you will immediately know what I mean if I describe something as niminy-piminy. Yes, a little bit niminy-piminy. I think it's a word that W.S. Gilbert liked to use in some of his songs in the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Niminy-piminy. It's a nice... Niminy-piminy. It means just a bit feeble and lacking in vigour. So that's a niminy-piminy argument, for example. I just quite like the sound of that. Then number two, I think is very useful, particularly if you're biting into a very sour apple, scringe. And to scringe is to screw up the face.

So imagine a really puckered face, you're scringing. And finally, I may have had this in one of my trios before, but I'm trying, as you know, to put weight on. And so I'm trying to become a slap source. And a slap source is a centuries-old description of a glutton. Very good. Yeah. Well, I've been trying to think of the right poem to read today with reference to war.

And the one I've chosen, I assumed, was written during the Second World War. It's a famous poem by John Betjeman, later the poet laureate. And it's about the town of Slough. So you know already what the poem's called, don't you? I do. Yes, I do. And what is interesting, I assume it was written during the Second World War and was to encourage the bombing of Slough.

In fact, it was written before the Second World War. It was written in, I think, 1937. And Slough, which is a town in England, and actually, I've been there. I like it. I know it. It's not far from Windsor. It's a lovely place. But in the 1930s, a huge new trading estate was opened. I think something like 800 factories were put up just before the outbreak of World War II. And John Betjeman didn't like these and wrote this poem that was controversial then, remains controversial now. And I think in later years, he perhaps regretted some of the harshness of it. But, well, you'll see what the poem is about. It still doesn't have much of a reputation,

does it, Slough? And I wonder if it's because of, well, it's proximity to Windsor, which is seen as being the much sort of smarter bit, isn't it? And I think it's also because of this poem. Yeah, this poem. Which may be unfair, but here we are. Come, come friendly bombs and fall on Slough. It isn't fit for humans now. There isn't grass to graze a cow.

Swarm over death. Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens those air-conditioned bright canteens, tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, tinned minds, tinned breath. Mess up the mess they call a town, a house for ninety-seven down, and once a week a half a crown for twenty years. And get that man with double chin, who'll always cheat and always win, who washes his repulsive skin in women's tears, and smash his desk of polished oak, and smash his hands so used to stroke, and stop his boring dirty joke, and make him yell. But spare the bald young clerks who add the profits of the

stinking cad. It's not their fault that they are mad. They've tasted hell. It's not their fault they do not know the birdsong from the radio. It's not their fault they often go to Maidenhead and talk of sport and makes of cars in various bogus Tudor bars and daren't look up and see the stars but belch instead. In labour-saving homes with care, their wives frizz out peroxide hair and dry it in synthetic air and paint their nails. Come, friendly bombs and fall on slough, to get it ready for the plough. The cabbages are coming now. The earth exhales. I love that sort of tinned mind, tinned breath. I mean, I'm with him on this whole sort of intensive production type, you know, approach. Yes. I mean, basically, it's a cry against

modernity and the things that modernity brought even back before the Second World War with these new offices and office blocks, homes that were high rise, factories. He didn't like any of it. And he never did. And in many ways, he was right. So there we are. But there we are. If you thought it was, I did, it was a Second World War poem, it wasn't. It was really a poem against modernity written in the 1930s.

Brilliant. Thank you for reminding us of that one. Well, we hope you really loved the show today. Please keep following us on, well, wherever you get your podcasts essentially and do please consider the purple plus club for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus episodes on words and language something rhymes with purple is a sony music entertainment production produced by nayadeo with additional production from hannah newton and naomi oiku, Chris Skinner, Jen Mystery and... Richie.

We've got Richie today. We've got Richie today. Who cares about gully? That's a word from an earlier war.