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Jennifer Rosenberg

Trench Talk

By , About.com GuideNovember 28, 2012

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So many words and phrases that are used in our everyday speech can be traced to the trenches of World War I. Perhaps most obvious is the term "trench coat," but did you know "lousy," "crummy," "fed up," "snapshot," and "washed out" also all came from soldiers chatting in the trenches?

Want to know more? The Telegraph has an interesting article about the upcoming book, Trench Talk: Words of the First World War by Peter Doyle and Julian Walker, which has information about words created in the trenches, words that used to be local but spread because of WWI, technological words that came from WWI, and words from other languages that made it into English because of the war.

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