Being aware of how words are used at different times is important when reading older texts, even if these are not very old. The language that was used by the war poets a hundred years ago is very similar to what we find today, but looking closer we may find that some words have changed meaning or are used in other contexts. Being aware of these changes are important when trying to understand a text.

In this exercise we will move away from the poetry and instead look at how slang from the First World War has come into everyday use. To do this we need a corpus – a collection of different kinds of texts showing how people write and speak, such as the British National Corpus, a collection of over 100 million words of spoken and written English from the early 1990s.

You can use the corpus online in several places. One popular tool is found at https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/ Here, you can search the BNC and other collections of text for free. (Note that you will be asked to register. See below for details of an alternative tool which does not require registration).

Here, you will find some instruction for how to use the BNC on the English-Corpora.org site.

Go to https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/. You may be asked to register or log in. Type the word ‘blighty’ into the search box and click ‘Find matching strings’ . ‘Blighty’ was a word used by the soldiers to imply England, or a description of a wound that would get you back to England (from the Urdu ‘bilayati’ meaning ‘foreign’). You will see a list with the word(s) matching your search and the frequency. Click on the word to see a list of concordances showing your search word in context. If you click on the three-letter code at the left of a concordance line, you will see more context and some information about the source text. That can help you see if the word still retains the meaning of 1914-1918.

Now try looking up the following slang used by the soldiers. You can find their First World War meaning after each expression. Which of these are still in use and what do they mean now? A1 [healthy] Above the parapet [peering out over the protection at the front of the trench] Brass hat or Brass [senior officer] Char [tea] Crummy [infested with lice (the eggs of the lice were like crumbs of bread)] Cushy [nice] Dud [a bomb that fails to explode] Kaput [ruined] No man’s land [land in between front line trenches not owned by either side] Over the top [attacking over the top of the trench] Plonk [cheap white wine] Pukka [genuine] Shell-shocked [psychological damage due to excessive exposure to front-line] Zero hour [exact time at which an attack begins]

Other searches

When you use a corpus, your results will depend on the corpus you use. The BNC contains British English material from around 1980-1993 found in a mix of sources (written and spoken). What you find there reflects language use in Britain from about thirty years ago. If you use a different corpus, you may well find that your results will be different. Try the exercises below to get a sense of how this can affect your findings.

Can you think of any words that have a different, or additional, meaning today and 30 years ago? 
[Hint: think about words and expressions related to the internet and mobile phones, popular culture, or social media. You can also try words that young people use today to describe something that is good/bad or someone who is looking good]

Go to https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/. Type one of your words into the search box,  and click ‘Find matching strings’. Look at the search results to see how the words were used before. Are these completely new words (= you will not find them in the corpus) or ones that have changed or acquired additional meaning (= there are examples in the corpus but they all mean something else)?

Explore a different corpus

You can find a number of other corpora from different times, regions and genres at https://www.english-corpora.org/. Try some of the previous searches on one or more of these. Would you expect the same results as before if you look at a corpus from the US or one that contains books printed between 1470s-1690s?

An alternative tool

If you prefer not to register to use a corpus, or just want to try a different tool, you can use the 'Inellitext' site. The British National Corpus is one of the corpora there,  and you can also find other material.

Go to the IntelliText website http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/itweb/htdocs/Query.html Click on 'Search the standard corpora' and select 'English' from the list. Click on the corpus you want to use (for example the BNC). Open the 'Choose Type of Search' tab. Select 'Concordance (=default) and type your search word into the box. Click 'Search'. PLEASE NOTE that the search is cases sensitive, which means that searches for 'blighty' and 'Blighty' will return different results. Try other searches if you like. Feel free to explore different words and different kinds of searches For more details, please explore the IntelliText User manual at http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/itpubweb/html/userguide.xml