ShowLanguage in Uniform

Words, phrases, expressions, idioms, and other linguistic and dialect features from the military and war. Typical topics include the roots of “your mother wears combat boots,” the naval slang behind “waltzing Matilda” for periscope duty, the term “charrette” for intensive workshopping, the Air Force origin of “ballpark estimate,” the potential Naval Academy slang origin of “skinny” for details, and the blend word “voluntold.”

Yelling Geronimo

A man in Surprise, Arizona, wonders why people jumping into a pool sometimes yell “Geronimo!” The history of this exclamation goes back to an eponymous 1939 movie about the famed Apache warrior Geronimo. The film was popular on U.S...

Civil War Letters

Private Voices, also known as the Corpus of American Civil War Letters, is an online archive of thousands of letters written by soldiers during the U.S. Civil War. Because the soldiers lacked formal education and wrote “by ear,” the...