Mind your language | 8 September 2007

English-speakers working in Russia generally go through a stage where they jokingly refer to a restaurant as a pectopah. The joke consists in pronouncing the cyrillic letters as if they were Roman. I was surprised to discover that the Germans fighting in Russia in the second world war made a joke on the same lines with the Russian for a barn (in which soldiers might well be billeted), calling it a capau (whereas the Russian would be transliterated saraj).

This I discovered from a new book on slang from the war called Fubar by Gordon L. Rottman (Osprey, £9.99). Unusually, in addition to two sections on British Commonwealth and American slang, he devotes 70 pages to German slang.

Naturally, German servicemen exhibited some of the same weary humour as British soldiers or schoolboys. So the Italian-issue tinned beef stamped AM (for Amministrazione Militare) was known to German soldiers as Arsch Mussolini (‘Mussolini’s Arse’) or alte Mann (‘old man’).