Here are some of the epithets commonly used for German soldiers during WWI:
Bosche – the pejorative French word for German is from the French “albosche” and “caboche” (head of cabbage or head of cabbage). This was very commonly applied to German soldiers by the French. They hardly knew the German soldier of the First or Second World War by any other name.
William Casselman, author of Canadian Words and Sayings has this to say regarding the Bosche expression:
“Boche is a French slang word for ‘rascal’ that was first applied to German soldiers during World War I, and was borrowed during the early years of that conflict in British English.
A definition is given in Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914-1918, edited by John Brophy and Eric Partridge, published in 1930. I have increased your note.
Boche is the preferred and most common English spelling. Bosche is a rarer alternate English spelling.
The word was first used in the phrase tête de boche. French philologist Albert Dauzat believed that boche was an abbreviation for caboche, playful French slang for ‘human head’, much like English comedic synonyms for head such as ‘the old noodle’, noggin, nut, numbskull.
One of the ways to say “be stubborn, be stubborn” in French is avoir la caboche dur. The root of the caboche in the former French province of Picardy is ultimately the Latin word caput ‘head’. Our English word cabbage has the same origin, the compact head of the leaves is a perfect ‘caboche’.
Boche Head was used as early as 1862 by stubborn people. It is printed in a document published in Metz. In 1874, French typographers applied it to German composers. In 1883, states Alfred Delvau’s Dictionary of the Green Language, the phrase had come to have the meaning of bad subject and that is why it was used especially by prostitutes.
The Germans, who had a reputation among the French for stubbornness and bad luck, came to be named with a joking version of German, namely, allboche or alboche. Around 1900, alboche was shortened to boche as a generic name for Germans. During the war, propaganda posters revived the term using the phrase dirty boche ‘dirty kraut’.
At the beginning of World War I, boche had two meanings in mainland French: (a) a German and (b) stubborn, headstrong, stubborn. Quickly during the course of the war, this French slang word was adopted by the English press and public.
By the time of World War II, while boche was still used in French, it had been replaced in mainland French by other derogatory terms, such as ‘maudit fritz’, ‘fridolin’ and ‘schleu’. These three milder pejoratives were common during the German occupation of France from 1941 to 1945 “3.
Fritz – a common German given name.
The English disparaging terms used by British troops during WWII were ‘Jerry’ and ‘Fritz’ in the British army and navy, and ‘Hun’ in the RAF. Canadian and American troops generally preferred ‘Heinie’, ‘Kraut’ or Fritz. 3
Heinie: probably a form of Heinz, another common German given name. Heinie or Hiney is dated by Lighter to Life in Sing Sing, a 1904 book and says it was in common use during WWI to denote Germans. 1 Heinie is also defined in the dictionary as slang for buttocks. 2
Hun – A throwback to the times of the barbaric German tribes known as the “Huns”.
The use of “Hun” in reference to German soldiers is a propaganda case. To completely dehumanize the enemy, he must first be thought of as distinctly different from you and yours. Initially it was quite difficult to get the “decent white people” of Blighty to get mad at the “otherwise decent white people” of central Europe. The solution, then, was to transform them philosophically into raging Mongol hordes from the East. A look at the simian characteristics applied to the German soldiers depicted on Allied propaganda posters leads us to the conclusion. Who would you fear and hate more, a nice blond, blue-eyed boy from Hamburg or a rapacious and rapacious monkey from some distant and dark land?
The “Huns” are the result of a comment by Kaiser Wilhelm when he sent a German expeditionary force to China during the Boxer Rebellion. Basically, he told his troops not to show mercy, saying that 1,000 years ago the Huns (an Asian nomadic people, in the least Germanic) led by Attila, had made such a name for themselves with their depredations that they were still considered synonymous. of wanton destruction, and urging the 1900 German troops in China to make a similar name for themselves that would last 1,000 years. When the Germans were fighting the French and the British just 14 years later, this pre-made piece of propaganda was too good to pass up the Allied side, particularly in light of reports coming from Belgium from the early days of the war. war.
Hun is defined in the dictionary as a barbaric or destructive person and also as offensive slang, used as a derogatory term for a German, especially a German soldier in World War 2.
Dutch – Used by American soldiers, meaning anyone who spoke with a guttural accent in America was commonly known as “Dutch”.
Dutch is defined in the dictionary as a term or related to any of the Germanic peoples or languages. 2
Kraut – an obviously shortened form of sauerkraut. Kraut, krout, crout as used in America in the 1840s to refer to the Dutch and by American soldiers during WWI and WWII to refer to the Germans with its origin in sauerkraut. 1 Kraut is defined in the dictionary as offensive slang and is used as a derogatory term for a German. Among Americans, this is the main recognized use of the word. 2
Squarehead or Blockhead: the most interesting of all was the nickname “Squarehead” or “Blockhead”, applied to German soldiers and mainly by American soldiers. I have often wondered if these two denominations had some anthropological origin. There are numerous references in the literature and by American soldiers to the effect that the shape of the skulls of German soldiers appeared to be “blocked” or “square”. One doughboy claims that he did an amateur study of the shape of the skulls of German soldiers and that, in his judgment, they definitely had a “locked” or “square” configuration. I can understand the expression as “remove the blockage” or “I will break down the blockage”, with “blockage” being the jargon of the head. Apparently, there was a causal relationship between these last two expressions and “square heads”. Did German male skulls have any relation to the physical positions they slept in as babies? Let’s look at some of the origins of “squarehead” and “blockhead”.
The idea has been ventured that “square head” and “dummy head” resulted from the shape of the German steel helmet from World War I. So far, no evidence has been gathered to support this observation.
Blockhead dates back to the 1500s and defines a stupid person, one block of wood for a head. I think it was probably misapplied to Germans due to their similarity to fool and eventually the words became synonymous. Squarehead has been used to describe Germans and Scandinavians and was used as a mild pejorative for Danes and Swedes in the American Midwest. It is believed to be of Austrian origin since the late 19th century. It defines an ethnic physical feature of a square-shaped face exhibited by some northern Europeans. It’s genetic, not because of how you slept. The similar box head appeared in the early 1900s before World War I.
Squarehead appears in The Slang of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, 1917-1919: An Historical Glossary by Jonathan Lighter, American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, vol. 47, Issues 1-2, Spring / Summer 1972 as used in America to describe Germans and Scandinavians before WWI. Lighter does not mention fool and does not offer any origin for that term.
The standard German military haircut seemed to produce the “square” or “block” look. This would also be in line with the term “jarhead” for an American Marine, again due to this hair style. “Squarehead”, at least, remained a term in vogue in the postwar era for anyone of German descent. Of course, each race and / or nationality has its own terms with which it is described, most of which today would be considered derogatory or racist.
Of course, when one considers the origins of the words “Squarehead” and “Blockhead”, the logical question arises: “What about” Roundheads “, an expression that gained popularity during the English Civil War? physical anthropology or how the “round” skull was formed in childhood?
In reality, the term “roundheads” for MPs was a derogatory (and apparently class-based) reference to the very short hair worn by London apprentices, with whom royalists apparently grouped all their opponents. (The counterinsult, “Cavalier”, compared the royalists to the knights, that is, the servants of authoritarian Catholic Spain). See Martyn Bennett, The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland 1638-1651, Blackwell, 1997, pp. 104-5.
Roundheads “of the English Civil War refers to the haircuts of the most puritanical members of the forces of Parliament: their basic bowl look, very short and very conservative. It distinguished them from the” gentlemen “(royalists), often of elegant style, gentlemen of noble birth, and often of considerable wealth, on the other side, with their long and extravagant hair.
“Roundhead” as a propaganda epithet for parliamentary soldiers seems to have its origin in the fact that they kept their hair short in front of the archetypal billowy locks of the royalist cavalrymen. While this was not always the case (in fact there is a famous van Dyke portrait of George, Lord Digby and William, Lord Russell, the former in the elegant ‘Cavalier’ attire and flowy bodice, the other in the somber Puritan Negro: the former fought for Parliament, the latter for the King) was a sufficient stereotype for both ‘Roundhead’ and ‘Cavalier’ to be used by propagandists as terms of insult, although this did not prevent both groups of soldiers from they will take the terms in their hearts as compliments. If one is to believe those two great historians Walter Carruthers Seller and Robert Julian Yeatman: The Roundheads, of course, were so named because Cromwell had all of their heads perfectly round, so that they would have a uniform appearance when drawn online. . In addition to this, if any man lost his head in action, the artillery could use it as a cannonball (which was done at the Worcester siege).
As for the denominations, we see that the German was less affectionately called Huns, Boche, and Jerries. The American soldiers were called Yanks and Doughboys, while the British were called British or Tommys and the French as Poilus “4.
NOTES
1. “The jargon of American expeditionary forces in Europe, 1917-1919: a historical glossary”, by Jonathan Lighter, American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, vol. 47, issues 1-2, spring / summer 1972.
2. The Free Dictionary, http://www.thefreedictionary.com
3. http://www.billcasselman.com and specifically his website http://www.billcasselman.com/wording_room/boche.htm. Material used with the permission of Mr. Casselman.
4. Chenoweth, H. Avery and Brooke Nihart, Semper Fi: The Definitive Illustrated History of the US Marines. NY: Main Street, 2005, page 142.