English in a Time of Total War

This chapter focusses on the language of total war, and its consequences, in Britain. Total war is marked by the explicit renegotiation of the boundaries of conflict, alongside the participants it claims; as contemporary comment stressed, the people were, in effect, now to be the new front line. For Clark, the language of aerial attack, and domestic response, was, by extension, to be another area of marked lexical and semantic shift, whether in the rise of distinctive collocations such as Zeppelin nights and Zeppelin barometers, or in the domestic diction of gas warfare (and gas marks) alongside the emergence of dug-outs on the Home Front. Time itself, via British Summer Time or artificial time, changed too, as – at least intentionally — did the language of key British institutions such as ‘buying a round’.