A History of English Language

The nineteenth century and after 283
moment or acquired a poignant significance from the circumstances under which they
were used.
It would seem that World War II was less productive of memorable words, as it was of
memorable songs. Nevertheless it made its contribution to the language in the form of
certain new words, new meanings, or an increased currency for expressions that had been
used before. In connection with the air raid, so prominent a feature of the war, we have
the words and expressions alert (air-raid warning), blackout, blitz (German Blitzkrieg,
literally ‘lightning war’), blockbuster, dive-bombing, evacuate, air-raid shelter. The
words beachhead, parachutist, paratroop, landing strip, crash landing, roadblock, jeep,
fox hole (as a shelter for one or two men), bulldozer (an American word used in a new
sense), decontamination, task force (a military or naval unit assigned to the carrying out
of a particular operation), resistance movement, and radar are not in the first edition of
the OED or its 1933 Supplement. To spearhead an attack, to mop up, and to appease
were new verbs or old verbs with a new military or political significance. Flak
(antiaircraft fire) was taken over from German, where it is an abbreviation of
Fliegerabwehrkanone, ‘antiaircraft gun’. Commando, a word that goes back to the Boer
War, acquired a new and specialized meaning. Some words that were either new or that
enjoyed great currency during the war—priority, tooling up, bottleneck, ceiling (upper
limit), backlog, stockpile—have become a part of the vocabulary of civilian life, while
lend-lease has passed into history. The aftermath of the war gave us such expressions as
iron curtain, cold war, fellow traveler, front organization, police state, all with a very
special connotation.
215. Language as a Mirror of Progress.
Words, being but symbols by which people express their ideas, are an accurate measure
of the range of their thoughts at any given time. Words obviously designate the things a
culture knows, and just as obviously the vocabulary of a language must keep pace with
the advance of the culture’s knowledge. The date when a new word enters the language is
in general the date when the object, experience, observation, or whatever it is that calls it
forth has entered public consciousness. Thus with a work like the OED, which furnishes
us with dated quotations showing when the different meanings of every word have arisen
and when new words first appear in the language, we could almost write the history of
civilization merely from linguistic evidence. When in the early part of the nineteenth
century we find growing up a word like horsepower or lithograph, we may depend upon
it that some form of mechanical power that needs to be measured in familiar terms or a
new process of engraving has been devised. The appearance in the language of words like
railway, locomotive, turntable about 1835 tells us that steam railways were then coming
in. In 1839 the words photograph and photography first appear, and a beginning is made
toward a considerable vocabulary of special words or senses of words such as camera,
film, enlargement, emulsion, focus, shutter, light meter. Concrete in the sense of a
mixture of crushed stone and cement dates from 1834, but reinforced concrete is an
expression called forth only in the twentieth century. The word cable occurs but a few
years before the laying of the first Atlantic cable in 1857–1858. Refrigerator is first
found in English in an American quotation of 1841. The words emancipation and