The language starts feeling the effects of the war.

My imagination/memory might be faulty, but I remember when I was in England, a man was using a wrench and I said, “that looks really old.” and he smiled and said, “Yes, I got it during the ‘lease-lend’ says.” Am I remembering that correctly? Do right pondians say “lease-lend”?

I’ve never heard “juvie” used to refer to a person. I hear it as referring to a place of incarceration for juveniles.

I am inclined to dispute inclusion of Krebs. The word itself is a proper name (surname of Professor Hans Krebs) and as such is much older than 1941. Discovery of the Krebs cycle (also known as the citric acid or tricarboxylic acid cycle) is generally assigned to 1937, although elucidation of all the details is spread over a number of years. It is possible that the term “Krebs cycle” was first used in 1941, but if that’s what you mean in the 1941 list, then you should say it.

My imagination/memory might be faulty, but I remember when I was in England, a man was using a wrench and I said, “that looks really old.” and he smiled and said, “Yes, I got it during the ‘lease-lend’ says.” Am I remembering that correctly? Do right pondians say “lease-lend”?

It was an early variant even in the US; Life magazine from Feb. 3, 1941 says: “The topic of discussion was House Bill 1776, known generally as the Lease-Lend measure .... General Hugh S. Johnson testifies that in his opinion the Lease-Lend Bill is ‘another big jump down the avalanche way.’”

I agree with frma that the entry should be Krebs cycle.

My own observations:

April: Germany invades Yugoslavia and Greece to bail out the failed Italian invasion of the latter, fatally delaying the attack on the Soviet Union

Not true; in July 1940 Hitler told his military chiefs that the invasion would take place in May 1941.  The invasion was delayed by a month or so for other reasons, but as Wikipedia says, “An initial delay, which postponed the start of Barbarossa from mid-May to the end of June 1941, may have been insignificant, especially since the Russian muddy season came late that year.”

December: Two events assure eventual victory for the Allies. In the first, the Soviet Union begins its counterattack against German troops at the gates of Moscow, signaling the failure of the German invasion

Again, not true; the failure of Operation Barbarossa was not assured until the Battle of Kursk in 1943.  The defense of Moscow was heartening, but irrelevant in the larger scheme of things; Germany could have won without much difficulty if Hitler had not pursued such stupid and inconsistent strategies.

gremlin, n. This term for a mythological entity who sabotages aircraft is first recorded among R. A. F. pilots in 1941, but the term may be older. The first citation in the OED, from Charles Patrick Graves’s 1931 Thin Blue Line reads as follows: “He wished that his instructor had never told him about the Little People—a mythological bunch of good and bad fairies originally invented by the Royal Naval Air Service in the Great War. [...] Those awful little people, the Gremlins, who run up and down the wing with scissors going ‘snip, snap, snip’ made him sweat.”

I’m confused; if it’s attested in this sense from 1931, why is it a 1941 word?

Great stuff, as always, Dave. Keep up the good work. 

Shangri-la

Lost Horizon was Pocket Book No. 1. The transparent film coating, I recall, used to peel off those early Pocket Books very easily. One tended to pick at it obsessively, the way one picked at scabs on injured knees.

Wikipedia says that Wuthering Heights (Pocket Book No. 7) was a best-seller in Pocket Books. Considering that the book had already been around for almost a hundred years, one might assume that its selection by Pocket Books, and publishing success, may have been connected with the appearance of the movie (L. Olivier, M. Oberon, D. Niven) a year or so earlier. Perhaps Lost Horizon (which had also been around for several years) also got picked for Pocket Books because of the movie, which starred Ronald Colman.

Good year for the acronyms.

I’m confused; if it’s attested in this sense from 1931, why is it a 1941 word?

1931 is a typo by Dave.

BTW I posted all of this elsewhere. One fellow, an Australian, said that the original jeep was a car, not a truck.

I’ve never heard “juvie” used to refer to a person. I hear it as referring to a place of incarceration for juveniles.

The OED doesn’t record that sense until 1966.  However, it’s not clear that the 1941 cite means “juvenile delinquent”; it’s from a compilation of “Hash House Lingo” and is glossed simply as “child”.  Based on that, it appears to mean simply “juvenile” (n.) but not “delinquent”.

The U. S. Army classified the jeep as a “quarter-ton truck.” But feel free to call it a car. You say potato, I say potato. (That doesn’t really work in print, does it.)

Thanks for the corrections all.

Dave Wilton - 10 November 2011 04:58 PM

The U. S. Army classified the jeep as a “quarter-ton truck.” But feel free to call it a car. You say potato, I say potato. (That doesn’t really work in print, does it.)
.

Doesn’t bother me one way or the other

Corrections made. I’m keeping Krebs as the headword because that’s how it’s listed in the OED. I’ve italicized the entire term Krebs cycle in the text though.

V-sign, n. The sign, denoting victory ...

I an astonished to see that the rude version, with the back of the hand forwards, is not recorded in print by the OED until seven years after the Churchillian version.