Gott Strafe England: Words from the Great War

Putting aside the many echoes that the word “absence” may raise when referred to such a traumatic collective experience as a world war – absence as lack of life (both real and metaphorical), dearth, deprivation, destruction, oblivion –, this work intends to explore how the historical events of the years 1914-18 had their impact on many linguistic phenomena: the absence of a shared language among soldiers coming from different socio-cultural and geographical contexts led to the birth of war slang, whose words were either doomed to disappearance or to long-lasting permanence in the English language; at the same time, the absence of pre-existing lexicon for unprecedented things and situations stimulated an unusual and extraordinary burst of creativity, ultimately turning the absence in an enriching presence not only in the English language, but also in the European modern thought and consciousness.