This book offers a foray into many of the lexical practices that emerged during World War I by providing an examination of how soldiers on both sides changed language through soldier slang. Some notable themes that emerged throughout this work include: how language from the battlefield changed language at home, the complex multilingual situation(s) that occurred at the front, orthographic changes in English, language ideologies during the war period, how slang and nonstandard varieties of English both gained wider acceptability during the war, as well as the emotional effects of war on language. The data that Walker used to discuss lexical practices of the First World War are derived from newspapers, letters home, memoirs, trench journals, phrasebooks, and other media published during or about the First World War. My focus here is on the many forms of taboo language that were conventionalized during the war.

Taboo talk and language is a prominent theme that emerged in the book. Such taboos included the use of euphemisms and swear words among soldiers, which gained a somewhat wider acceptance on the home front as well. Taboo here also includes avoidance and censorship, as soldiers at the front were subjected to the censorship of their correspondence. Soldiers avoided talking or writing about specific incidents including death and gore. Such avoidance could have been related to censorship that eventually led to soldiers self-censoring themselves. Such taboos, avoidances, and censorship possibly had a lasting effect after the war. Walker notes that there was effectively a silent period that had lasted for decades after the war. Such silence was perhaps a form of self-censorship bound up in such phrases as ‘he was in the war but never spoke of it’ (280). The silence was broken twenty years after the war with the publication of a deluge of memoirs, with another surge in breaking the silence after the BBC documentary The Great War aired in 1964.

Taboo speech also entered the lexicon of officialese, which emerged as both a form of speaking and a linguistic code during the war. A disturbing example of this is how the British forces referred to their use of gas during the war. Abhorred by the fact that they had to use it if only for retaliation for its use by the other side, the British devised a way to refer to its use in official correspondence without explicitly saying so. Hence referring to it as the ‘accessory’ was a means of objectifying what was perceived as an immoral tool of war. Officialese made its way into the lexicon through language that created a dehumanizing voice (e.g. 95,000 fresh rifles in which ‘rifles’ are soldiers).

Having just passed the centennial of World War I, this book celebrates the language of the war and offers a thorough account of the role of language(s) and their varieties during conflict. Both lay people and academics will find value in Words and the First World War. Walker's analytical approach is historical in nature and not necessarily pure lexicological analysis. Yet Walker is able to weave in some sociological analysis pertaining to social class, dialects, and slang. A hundred years from now what will we be able to say about the language in the global war on terror?