Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 72, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 March 1919 — New Words and How They Are Born and Find Their Way Into Everyday Use [ARTICLE]

New Words and How They Are Born and Find Their Way Into Everyday Use

"Camouflage” Is a manufactured word nearly as new to the French as to the English. You will not find it In your French dictionary. But, somehow, it seems to express its own meaning—all those devices which were used to hide gun positions, etc., from the spyhawks in the air. The word “commandeer” was the chief gift of the Boer war and is now most firmly established in everyday talk. The troubles of the “distressful counthry” gave us the word boycott. It happened that the surname Boycott belonged to an Irish land owner whom the authorities assisted to reap a harvest that the peasants refused to touch by sending soldiers on his land. He was the first man to be “boycotted,” that Is, “sent to Coventry" by his neighbors, ostracised, put off the map. Mackintosh, Shrapnel, Macadam, Maxim, Guillotine, Brougham, Victoria, Garibaldi, Gladstone and Lynch are all examples of, surnames becoming dictionary words of the very commonest kind.