20 Common Phrases That Came From War, Death And Disaster

On July 1, 1946, the U.S. dropped a 23-kiloton nuclear bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Four days later, French designer Louis Réard presented his daring two-piece bathing suit in Paris. He called his invention “le bikini” to piggyback on the bomb’s explosive impact. And it worked. Maybe that’s why we say someone’s “the bomb” when they look so good in one!

The word deadline, later used by American newsrooms during the 1910s and 1920s to refer to a time limit, originally had a much more literal meaning. At the Confederate prison at Andersonville, known as Camp Sumter, guards marked a line approximately 19–20 feet inside the stockade fence, and sentries were allowed to shoot prisoners who crossed it. Captain Walter Bowie wrote of this practice in his May 1864 report after inspecting the prison.

In 1887, the word sideburns appeared in print with the syllables switched from the now-obscure term “burnsides.” Burnsides were named after Union Major General Ambrose Burnside, who sported a distinctive mustache connected to whiskers with a clean-shaven chin. His disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg in December 1862 may have faded from popular memory, but his facial hair certainly didn’t. Burnsides became a popular look in the 1860s, and eventually, the name got flipped into the sideburns we know today.

From 1943 to 1945, the Army Signal Corps produced a series of training films entitled SNAFU, which were animated by Chuck Jones and written by Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. Troops coined the acronym in 1941 to describe the inevitable absurdity of army life. SNAFU officially stood for “Situation Normal: All Fouled Up,” although the troops likely used a rougher profanity in place of the latter word.

Rumor held that quadruple amputee veterans of World War I were being transported in wicker baskets. The rumor became widespread enough that Surgeon General Merritte Ireland issued a press release on March 28, 1919, confirming that no such “basket cases” existed, and his denial became headline news. The rumor eventually died, but the phrase lived on. Funny how language sometimes remembers the rumor better than the truth.

In 1942, the American press used the term “blockbusters” to refer to hit movies, books, and plays. The term originated in 1941, when the RAF developed a 4,000-pound bomb with relatively thin walls to maximize its blast effect. British newspapers dubbed these bombs “blockbusters” because their blasts could destroy an entire block of a city. Later versions of this bomb weighed 8,000 and 12,000 pounds.

During a press conference about Project MX981, Dr. John Paul Stapp was asked about the project’s safety record. Stapp credited Murphy’s Law, referring to Edward Murphy’s experience on Project MX981, testing deceleration (braking) forces with rocket sleds. One of the test runs failed when a technician inadvertently installed all 16 strain-gauge sensors backward.

At the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, Admiral Hyde Parker signaled to Horatio Nelson that he was to fall back. But Nelson, who had been blind in one eye since 1794, held his spyglass up to his blind eye and said, “I really do not see the signal.” He then continued with his attack. However, as perfect as the story seems, Nelson didn’t actually invent the phrase “turn a blind eye,” which had been used since at least 1698.

The term “Gung Ho,” often used to describe overzealous enthusiasm, began as Marine officer Evans Carlson’s interpretation of the term gōnghé (meaning “working together”), under which China’s Industrial Cooperatives were organized in the late 1930s. The phrase became a national sensation after a 1943 film; Carlson’s 2nd Marine Raider Battalion, formed in 1942, had “Gung Ho” as its motto.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s final return to power ended at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, near the town of Waterloo in present-day Belgium. There, he was defeated by Anglo-Allied forces under the Duke of Wellington and Prussian troops led by Field Marshal Blücher. Napoleon was then exiled for the final time to Saint Helena. His downfall gave us the phrase “meet your Waterloo,” meaning to finally suffer a crushing defeat.

Legend says wounded soldiers bit down on a bullet during battlefield surgery to endure the pain. However, medical historians dispute this. Chewing on a bullet, which can easily break teeth or block an airway, is unlikely. Instead, patients clenched leather or wood in their mouths. The phrase actually dates back to a military punishment of whipping in the 18th and 19th centuries. A similar version of the phrase appeared in print in 1811, and soldiers also bit open paper cartridges with their teeth. Rudyard Kipling popularized its current incarnation in 1891.

By the mid-20th century, boondocks had entered the mainstream lexicon. It began as a mispronunciation by U.S. soldiers during the Philippine-American War (1899 to 1902) of the Tagalog word for mountain—bundók—which was used to refer to the difficult terrain where they fought in Luzon’s rugged interior. It spread in part because of its usage by the Marines throughout Pacific bases in WWII.

The word scuttlebutt originally referred to the “butt,” or wooden barrel of drinking water found on 19th-century ships. “Scuttle” meant making a hole in the cask through which sailors could draw water. As sailors gathered around the scuttlebutt to drink, they naturally exchanged news and rumors, and by the 1910s, U.S. Navy slang had transferred the name from the water barrel to the gossip itself. So yes, it was basically the sailors’ version of watercooler gossip!

In October 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, Nationalist General Emilio Mola claimed there was a network of hidden Nationalist sympathizers in Madrid waiting to aid the Nationalist army from within as he brought four columns of troops to bear upon the Republican capital. Madrid-based Republican press warned of the so-called “fifth column,” and a 1938 play by Ernest Hemingway cemented the phrase in the English language.

The phrase “Loose Lips Might Sink Ships,” as we know it today, comes from a 1942 poster designed by artist Seymour Goff for Seagram Distillers, in cooperation with the U.S. War Advertising Council and the Office of War Information. The poster cautioned Americans against gossiping about military movements (since careless talk could reveal valuable information to the enemy). Over time, the phrase became the more familiar “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” dropping the word might along the way.

From the 1500s, European monarchs such as Charles V and Henry VIII tied red cloth tape around government documents. 19th-century writers Washington Irving, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens popularized the use of the phrase “red tape” as shorthand for bureaucracy; this metaphorical use was further popularized in the United States by American clerks, who were saddled with the vexatious task of untangling the red-tied pension claims of Civil War veterans.

On the Western Front during World War I, armies faced off from trenches across No Man’s Land. “Over the top” referred to scaling the trench wall under enemy fire once a charge was ordered; soldiers would attach bayonets to their weapons and climb the parapet using ladders or piles of sandbags. The phrase appeared in soldiers’ diaries and correspondence by 1915 and became known to civilians as a metaphor for anything extreme by the late 1920s.

The phrase “back to the wall” originally came from 16th-century sword fighting and meant having no more room to retreat. It was brought back into widespread use by a Special Order from British commander Douglas Haig during the German Spring Offensive in 1918, which read, “With our backs to the wall… each one of us must fight on to the end.” The order was printed in newspapers around the world.

“Decimate” comes from the Latin verb decimare, meaning “to take a tenth.” When Roman commanders decimated a cohort for cowardice or mutiny—a punishment known as decimatio—they divided the soldiers into groups of ten and had them draw lots; the unlucky one was put to death by the other nine. The punishment, therefore, killed 10 percent of the group, rather than the majority that decimation commonly refers to today. Not exactly the lottery you’d want to win—or lose, for that matter.

When King Pyrrhus of Epirus defeated Rome’s army at the Battle of Asculum in 279 BC, he lost thousands of veteran soldiers and almost all of his senior officers in the process. When congratulated on his victory, he reportedly said, “One more such victory over the Romans and we are completely undone.” The line, recorded by Plutarch, gave us the term “Pyrrhic victory,” meaning a victory so costly that it’s almost as bad as a defeat.

This content was created with the help of AI.