I'm a young Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today we're heavy on the history.

In honor of Veterans Day, we'll talk about words from World War II and in honor of national

novel writing month because you have to name everyone and everything you create in fiction,

we'll talk about how places get their names.

A few months ago, I participated in a game show fundraiser for the NOAA Webster House with

a bunch of other language people.

And Peter Sackelowski from Miriam Webster made an off-handed comment about World War II

being a rich source of new words, which made me curious about which words.

So I thought since today's Veterans Day in the United States, it would be a good time

to satisfy that curiosity.

How might you go about finding such words you might wonder?

Well, the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary has some fabulous search filters.

And the most interesting way I was able to search for World War II words was to search

for entries that included the word slang in their etymology and that show the first time

the word was used as being in the early 1940s.

For example, you may remember that a few episodes ago when we were talking about the word

schnauz being a word for your nose, I mentioned that piehole is a word for your mouth.

Well my 1940s slang search turned up a similar, earlier word, cakehole that also describes

your mouth, and it started out as military slang.

You can tell because the first citation is from a 1943 book called Service Slang and

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