From: Doughboy Center: The Story of the American Expeditionary Forces
For us today, and maybe for all Americans who will follow, the Doughboys were the men America sent to France in the Great War, who licked Kaiser Bill and fought to make the world safe for Democracy.
The expression doughboy, though, was in wide circulation a century before the First World War in both Britain and America, albeit with some very different meanings. Horatio Nelson's sailors and Wellington's soldiers in Spain were both familiar with fried flour dumplings called doughboys, the predecessor of the modern doughnut that both we and the Doughboys of World War I came to love. Because of the occasional contact of the two nation's armed force and transatlantic migration, it seems likely that this usage was known to the members of the U.S. Army by the early 19th century.
Independently, in the former colonies, the term had come to be applied to baker's young apprentices, i.e. dough-boys. Again, American soldiers probably were familiar with this usage. This version of doughboy was also something of a distant relative to "dough-head", a colloquialism for stupidity in 19th Century America. When doughboy was finally to find a home with the U.S. Army it would have a disparaging connotation, used most often by cavalrymen looking down [quite literally] on the foot-bound infantry.
In examining the evolution of doughboy these pre-existing streams of application need to be kept in mind. There is, however, an absence of literary citations clearly connecting either to the American miliary. Doughboy as applied to the infantry of the U.S. Army first appears, without any precedent that can be documented, in accounts of the Mexican-American War of 1846-47.
But wait, there's more!! For more information on the history and origin of the "doughboy," visit this site
.
No comments:
Post a Comment