In the Army, a battle buddy is someone assigned to be your constant companion, and it’s often shortened to just “battle.” Other words, like Upstate and cell, as in a mobile phone, have dropped the nouns they modified. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Battle Buddies”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
We got a call from David in New York.
He serves in the military in the Army, and he had a question about the term battle buddy.
Do you know this term?
Battle buddy.
This is a term that’s used for the guy who’s your constant companion.
He looks out for you.
He’s part of your training.
He’s involved in your safety.
You probably will spend a lot of time with your battle buddy.
And in the Army, they abbreviate that as your battle.
They’ve turned the battle there into just a noun to refer to the whole phrase.
Really? Here comes my battle.
Yeah, well, he’s my battle. He’s got my back, right?
And so David’s question was, how can you tell what’s going to happen to a phrase like that?
You’ve got this two-word compound, battle, buddy.
Battle is serving as an adjectival noun describing buddy, which is just a noun.
And yet it’s shortened to battle, and that doesn’t seem to happen all that commonly in English.
I put the word out on Facebook and Twitter after we got his call and asked for examples that other people could think of where this has happened.
And we came up with quite a few things like upstate New York is often abbreviated as upstate or high school is often called high.
But only if you’re referring to the name of the school like West Side High.
Right.
And mashed potatoes, particularly in the UK, might be referred to as mashed.
I’ll take some mashed, please.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I didn’t know that.
Wireless, right?
The wireless radio or cell phone.
It’s actually cellular phone or cell phone is abbreviated as my cell or my mobile phone becomes my mobile.
So we have some examples of this.
And what’s really interesting, it almost seems to happen that that two-word compound is shortened to the first word when shortening to the last word would make some confusion.
So battle buddy, you couldn’t just abbreviate it to buddy because that means something else.
Your buddy is probably a real friend friend and not somebody assigned to you by the bureaucracy of the army, right?
So you’re differentiating between your battle buddy and your regular buddy by saying, he’s my battle, but he’s my buddy.
Does it make sense?
Sure.
Just think about cellular phone.
Well, I have to abbreviate it.
It’s a cell phone because phone, for the long time, while this is changing, always meant the thing that was hardwired at your office desk or at home.
So that first word is restricting the meaning.
Yeah, it’s restricting.
And you go to that first word for the abbreviation because it adds clarity where going to the last part would actually add confusion.
So it doesn’t always work that way.
I wanted to talk about that term battle buddy, though.
It was introduced in the Army in around the year 2000 as part of this program to reduce suicides and to increase performance and kind of just make sure that soldiers were getting the kind of personal, emotional attention they needed in order to be good soldiers, right?
Oh, so this was by decree?
Yeah, it was part of an official program.
It didn’t grow up organically then.
No.
Oh, interesting.
But the thing is there’s a slang term that’s the opposite, and I can’t say the whole term.
Why not, Grant?
Well, it’s because the opposite might be Blue Falcon or Bravo Foxtrot, which stands for buddy and then a form of the F word that we can’t say on the radio.
Friend.
No.
So Blue Falcon or Bravo Foxtrot is the opposite of your battle buddy.
He’s somebody who doesn’t pick up his share of the work.
Oh, really?
Yeah, who makes you kind of do what he’s supposed to be doing.
Oh, really?
Or kind of leaves you hanging high and dry.
Okay.
So not the same as a BFF.
No, not by any stretch of the organization.
No.
You know, we love hearing from the military when they have slang that they want to share or questions about their language or a story to tell about what it was like to learn the jargon of that particular business.
If you’re in the military, I’d love to hear from you, 877-929-9673, or email us.
The address is words@waywordradio.org.
