hich means to be discovered or detected or found out. These
words have now spread far beyond the confines of the army. And indeed
the rapidity with which all slang and all catch-phrases can be
disseminated offers a rather alarming prospect. For whereas, before the
war, slang at its silliest was often quite local, nowadays its
restriction within given localities has in the nature of things become
impossible. A war hospital such as ours contains inmates from every
county in Britain, as well as from every colony. The same intermingling
occurs on an infinitely greater scale in training-camps and at the
various fronts. All these centres are hotbeds of slang: the men go home
from them, carrying to their native places slang which would never, in
ordinary times, have penetrated there. In the army you will hear a
Scotchman doing what he never did before--dropping his aitches. He has
caught it from his English comrades. You will hear him say "Not
'arf"--an inane tag which, despite its popularity in London, failed to
find any foothold north of the Tweed before the war. "Not 'arf" was
mouthed by Sassenach comedians on the music-hall stages of Edinburgh
and Glasgow, and was grinned at for what it was worth: the streets did
not adopt it. Now the streets will hear it and will use it: it is one of
Jock's souvenirs from his campaign.

I am afraid that another triviality which has hitherto been to the taste
only of the south of England is fated to "catch on," by means of the
same missionaries, from Land's End to John o' Groat's, and even in the
colonies. Rhyming slang is extraordinarily common in the army, so common
that it is used with complete unconsciousness as being correct
conversational English. My friend of the king-like toe spoke of his feet
as "plates of meat"--and this though he was an Australian, not a
cockney. If he had had occasion to allude to his leg he would probably
have called it "Scotch peg." A man's arm is his "false alarm"; his nose,
"I suppose"; his eye, "mince pie"; his hand, "German band"; his boot,
"daisy root"; his face "chevvy chase"; and so forth--an interminable
list. What exactly was the _raison d'etre_ of this pseudo-poetic mania I
do not know, but I suspect that it originated, in the distant past,
with the poverty of rhyme-invention on the part of the writers of the
cruder kind of pantomime songs--"round the houses," for example, being
both a rhyme to and a synonym for "trousies" (garments beloved of those