As the war in Ukraine continues, new language rises—from Russia’s notion of a special operation, not an invasion or a war, to the crowdsourcing of SAR images, synthetic aperture radar satellite data that provide real-time images taken at night and through cloud cover. Twitter hashtags—#KyivNotKiev, #KharkivNotKharkov—ensure that the current Ukrainian names are chosen over the Soviet-era spellings; Apple changed the spelling of Kiev to Kyiv in its clock app.
War connects nations and peoples in new ways—either as allies, enemies, or refugees and asylum seekers. The result is a new exchange of words and worldviews.
Some expressions or words that have been idling in a language spring to life in war. Take the Gulf War and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, who in 1990 described the conflict as the “mother of all battles.” The expression was a calque, or direct translation, from the Arabic umm al-ma‘rik, and it had barely been used in English since the 1930s. Now there are countless new adaptations—mother of all sanctions (against Russia), mother of all deadlines (Christmas), mother of all recessions (1992) and so on.
The word mud, now a slang term for heroin, entered English in the First Opium War as slang for “opium.” It was a calque from Chinese, in which smoking opium was expressed as yn tu, or “smoke soil.”
As Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, we saw BBC footage of Ukrainian grandmothers making Molotov cocktails. The original Molotov cocktail was Finnish slang for the makeshift hand grenades thrown at Soviet tanks when they entered Finland in 1939. Appropriating the pseudonym of the Soviet minister for foreign affairs Vyacheslav Molotov (molot means “hammer” in Russian), the cocktails were named in response to “Molotov’s breadbaskets”—containers carrying bombs used by the Soviets against Finland.
When the First World War ended, soldiers brought new language home with them: cheerio (which first appears in a letter from Rupert Brooke in 1914); salvage (as soldiers helped themselves to items left behind by fleeing civilians); civvies, non-uniform clothes; to tick off (first recorded in a letter from Wilfred Owen); scupper and rehab. The Second World War brought lurgy and VIP. Vietnam gave us clusterfuck, the nasties, the enemy, and klicks for kilometre. Time will reveal the full extent of the impact of the war in Ukraine on the English language.
