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a b c Wild, Kate (21 February 2014). "The English expressions coined in WW1". BBC Magazine . Retrieved 22 February 2014. After the introduction of conscription in 1916, the distinction between soldiers and civilians became less clear, and vocabulary passed readily from one group to the other. This is the case with ... Blighty. The Urdu words vilayat ("inhabited country", specifically Europe or Britain) and vilayati ("foreign", or "British, English, European") were borrowed by the British in the 19th Century.... But it was the regional variant bilayati - rendered as Blighty in English and meaning "Britain, England, home" - which really took off in Britain. Although it was first used during the Boer war, it was not until WW1 that Blighty spread widely and developed new meanings. Blighty, Christmas 1917". Digital.nls.uk. The War Office, The Admiralty, The Red Cross . Retrieved 13 February 2014. This article is about the slang term for Britain. For other uses, see Blighty (disambiguation). A World War I example of trench art: a shell case engraved with a picture of two wounded Tommies nearing the White Cliffs of Dover with the inscription "Blighty!" During the First World War, "Dear Old Blighty" was a common sentimental reference, suggesting a longing for home by soldiers in the trenches. The term was particularly used by World War I poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. During that war, a " Blighty wound" – a wound serious enough to require recuperation away from the trenches, but not serious enough to kill or maim the victim – was hoped for by many, and sometimes self-inflicted. [7] Examples [ edit ] British soldiers reading copies of Blighty magazine outside their dugout in France, December 1939.
Blighty" in the Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014; and in Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, 2010. Accessed 27 February 2016.
Blighty became the greatest hit of Fred Godfrey’s early career. Years later, in 1929, he was induced to appear on the Variety stage with Irish tenor Tom E. Finglass. The act featured Godfrey’s best-known chorus songs — with Fred on piano, an ever-present fag hanging from his lip — and Blighty was their big finish. After their 11 November 1929 appearance at the Exeter Hippodrome, the local newspaper’s reviewer gushed, Blighty is commonly used as a term of endearment by the expatriate British community or those on holiday to refer to home. In Hobson-Jobson, an 1886 historical dictionary of Anglo-Indian words, Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell explained that the word came to be used in British India for several things the British had brought into the country, such as the tomato and soda water.
The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress. Filming Locations for Bryan Forbes' Sixties classic The L-Shaped Room in Notting Hill". Movie-locations.com . Retrieved 9 June 2018. Coward favoured Blighty once again, having returning Tommies sing it as the camera pans over the London streets of 1919 from high above in the film’s opening sequence.Think of all those songs of the war sung in ritual once a year on November 11. Who wrote them?....It is odd, this anonymity about the authorship of the songs we all sang in those war years....What do their composers think when they hear those songs of the war every Armistice Day? And do the singers ever wonder who wrote the words and music of the songs with such poignant memories? it was effervescent Dorothy Ward, wife of Music Hall star and songwriter Shaun Glenville, who introduced it. In a newspaper article, Miss Ward
War songs and their writers,” Sunday Times (Perth, Australia), 15 October 1933, p. 11; reprinted from the London Sunday Times. The word derives from the Urdu word Viletī, (older sources mention a regional Hindustani language but the use of b replacing v is found in Bengali) meaning 'foreign', [4] which more specifically came to mean 'European', and 'British; English' during the time of the British Raj. [5] The Bengali word is a loan of Indian Persian vilāyatī ( ولایاتی), from vilāyat ( ولایت) meaning 'Iran' and later 'Europe' or 'Britain', [6] ultimately from Arabic wilāyah ولاية meaning 'state, province'. The term subsequently gained an ironic connotation in its closeness to the English word “blight” meaning epidemic. It’s an example of typical post imperial British self effacement.Noël Coward used the song for his 1931 stage production Cavalcade, about British life in the first two decades of the twentieth century and in the 1944 film This Happy Breed. [ citation needed] It was also used in the 1954 Errol Flynn film Lilacs in the Spring. [ citation needed]
Recordings by Florrie Forde [3] and Ella Retford are the most commonly heard versions, though Dorothy Ward first sang it.Fred Godfrey wrote the song with Bennett Scott and A.J. Mills after passing a music hall in Oxford where a show called Blighty was showing. He recounts: "One of us suddenly said “What an idea for a song!” Four hours later it was all finished, and the whole country was singing it soon afterwards. I got — not very much." [1] [2] L-Shaped Room (1962); Flyboys (2006). The song was also interpolated in the “screen comedy” The Better ’Ole, starring Syd Chaplin and Bruce Bairnsfather (La Scala Theatre, Coventry, December 1927), but on the assumption this is a silent film, perhaps flash cards are merely used to indicate its being sung.. Blighty" is a British English slang term for Great Britain, or often specifically England. [1] [2] [3] Though it was used throughout the 1800s in the Indian subcontinent to mean an English or British visitor, it was first used during the Boer War in the specific meaning of homeland for the English or British, [4] [1] and it was not until World War I that use of the term became widespread. [4] Etymology [ edit ]