High Diction – Learn to Warspeak in Several Easy Stages.

 

       In 1976, Paul Fussell wrote one of the most influential books on the mythologisation of the war; The Great War And Modern Memory. Although the book itself is greatly flawed, Fussell highlights key elements in the rewriting of the war. Central to this is what he calls “High Diction”, a system of language specifically relating to warfare that had it’s roots on the chivalric poetry of Tennyson, Morris, Houseman, and the adventure stories of G.A. Henty, Boys Own Magazine, and Rider Haggard. To demonstrate how far language and the understanding of war has changed, the list that he describes is reproduced here. To a modern reader, these terms seem ridiculous, naïve and laced with sexual undertones. Yet as Fussell points out “One could use with security words which a few years later, after the war, one would consider obvious double entendres” … “in this world ‘he ejaculated breathlessly ‘ was a tag in utterly innocent dialogue rather than a moment in pornographic description” (p.23, The Great War And Modern Memory). My intention here is to demonstrate how describing the war has changed so drastically since 1914, and how mistaken it is to assume that we can easily understand how society and language were constructed in the early Twentieth Century.