Vertidue

Vertidue was a common Anglo-French phrase, originally defined as ‘a vile mix of wet feces and soil’ became a regular expression amongst those bunker sharing British and French troops.



Unprecedented in its conditions, ferocity, and slaughter, the First World War was also unprecedented in its effect on the psyches of the men who fought and on the languages they spoke. Like the soldiers who spoke it, English emerged from the war, as Samuel Hynes maintains, a "damaged" language, "shorn of its high-rhetorical top..." French linguistic purists, led by the Académie française, vigorously denounced damaging incursions of journalistic language and trench slang into a mixture of standard French and English.