10 New Words from World War II

A few months ago, I participated in a game-show fundraiser for The Noah Webster House with a bunch of other language people, and Peter Sokolowski from Merriam-Webster made an off-hand comment about World War II being a rich source of new words, which made me curious about which words, so I thought since today is Veterans Day in the United States, it would be a good time to satisfy that curiosity.

"How might you go about finding such words?" you might wonder. Well, the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary has some fabulous search filters, and the most interesting way I was able to search for WWII words was to search for entries that include the word “slang” in their etymology and show the first time the word was used as being in the early 1940s. 

1. Cakehole

You may remember that a few episodes ago, when we were talking about the word “schnozz” being a word for your nose, I mentioned that “piehole” is a word for your mouth. Well, my 1940s slang search turned up a similar, earlier word—“cakehole”—that also describes your mouth, and it started out as military slang. You can tell because the first citation is from a 1943 book called “Service Slang” and reads, “Cake hole, the airman's name for his or anyone else's mouth.”

“Piehole” is much newer; it didn’t show up until 1983, but I’d be willing to bet it was modeled on “cakehole,” so we can ultimately thank those 1940s airmen for both. I guess back then cake was just more popular than pie.

The term made me wonder if troops got cake in their rations. It seemed unlikely since I can’t imagine cake traveling well, and as far as I can tell, at least for troops from the US and UK, they didn’t get cake. The treats they got in their rations were typically candy. I guess they were just fantasizing about cake.

And that line of reasoning led me to investigate Twinkies because of their famed long shelf life. Could they have been stable enough to travel with the troops? I mean, they’re kind of cake. 

Twinkies did exist by World War II. They were invented in 1930, but back then their shelf life was only 26 days. And it turns out that even today with more preservatives, the...

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