not cause
the output of rumours to diminish. Apparently the army is a prolific
soil for rumours, inasmuch as they have a special name: a rumour is
called a _buzz_. "Only a buzz" ("it's only a rumour") is an expression
often heard on the lips of soldiers. In India it is sometimes "a bazaar
buzz" (a rumour circulating in the bazaars); here it is, naturally, a
bathroom buzz.

Many were the choice examples of slang and of colloquialisms which I
culled in the bathroom, sitting comfortably in my bath and communing
with my neighbour in the next bath. I remember one morning making the
acquaintance of an Australian who had recently recovered from a bad
attack of trench feet. Four of the toes of one foot were missing, and
the fifth looked far from sound. My friend was examining this lonely toe
with a critical gaze, and I sympathised with him over its condition.
"Ah!" he said, "that toe is a king to what it was." He went on to tell
me (what I could well believe) that to get your "plates of meat"
frostbitten wasn't such a "cushy wound" as it was cracked up to be by
those who had never experienced its sufferings. "When I went sick the
doctor thought he'd rumbled me swinging the lead. But as soon as he
spotted them there toes of mine--the ones that's gone--I could see he
knew I'd clicked a packet, square dinkum, this trip." ("Square dinkum"
or "dinkum" is an Antipodean verbal flourish, which broadly
approximates to the American "Sure enough" or the English "Not 'arf.")

Certain of these neologisms are common enough in civilian life--have
been imported into the army since 1914--but others (and the more
interesting ones, as I hold) were, until the war, limited to the
barrack-room. British regiments which had been abroad used an argot of
considerable antiquity, some of it of Oriental origin (_e.g._ "blighty,"
meaning "home": hence "a blighty wound," or simply "a blighty," an
injury sufficiently serious to cause the victim to be invalided to
England). Whether the derivations of army slang have been investigated I
do not know. It appears to me to be a subject worth examination. I am
not myself a philologist, but in the bathrooms and elsewhere in the
hospital I have heard and noted a small collection of slang phrases and
idioms, and these may be worth recording. Such expressions as "swinging
the lead" (malingering or deceiving or acting in a hypocritical manner
or getting the better of anyone) have lost their novelty. So has
"rumbled," w