an excellent account of the word origin of camouflage

Philip Hale, music critic

There were at least two prominent people named Philip Hale, who were contemporaries and both from New England.

Philip Leslie Hale (1865-1931) was an American Impressionist artist, who was related to Nathan Hale and Harriet Beecher Stowe. His father was Edward Everett Hale. We mentioned him in our previous post, because one of his students was ship camoufleur Thomas Casilear Cole. Another was Henry Wadsworth Moore, also a ship camoufleur.

The second was a musician and prominent newspaper critic named Philip Hale (1854-1934). Beginning in 1903, he was affiliated with The Boston Herald, for which he wrote a column called As the World Wags. In one of his columns, which was published on January 24, 1918, he offered what is—undoubtedly—the most detailed and authoritative account of the origin of the French word camouflage, which had become widely adopted as an English term during World War I.

There is nothing else like it. Since it is long out of copyright and otherwise hard to locate, we are republishing the entire column, for the convenience of researchers, as follows—

A correspondent, whose letter was published last Monday, rejoices because "camouflage" has found its way into the English language. He prefers the word to "disguise."

"Camouflage," however, is loosely used, absurdly used by many, who are glad to Include in a sentence any word that seems to them new or "the thing,” although they are wholly ignorant of the true meaning.

In the definition of "camouflage" the standard French dictionaries are of little or no use. Littre gives "camouflet," the noun, meaning “a thick smoke that one blows maliciously into the nose of one with a lighted paper cone." To give a "camouflet" is to affront, mortify a person. "Camouflet" is also a mining term. This French word is an old one. It is defined in Cotgrave’s dictionary (1678) as "a snuft or cold pie, a smoakie paper held under the nose of a slug or sleeper." Now, a cold pie in old colloquial English meant an application of cold water to wake a sleeper. “To give cold pig" was another form, and it is still used. In dialect a "cold pie” is an accident to a train or carriage in a pit, a fall on the ice, a disappointment of any kind.

In more modern French-English dictionaries, a camouflet is a whift of smoke in the face; a stifler; an affront, rap over the knuckles, snub.

In Larousse, we find the noun”camouflement," slang for a disguise; the verb, "camoufler," slang, to disguise, or to paint oneself; and "camouflet," mortification. The word "camouflage" does not appear.

Let us look at the French slang dictionarles. Le Roux, edition of 1752: "Camouflet. A blow on the face." Scarron is quoted. Then: "It is also a trick played on a person asleep; here is the explanation. One takes a half sheet of paper, rolls it in the form of a cone, and lights one end, puts the lighted end in the mouth, and blows smoke through the other end into the nose of a sleeper. This makes him wake up at once. In this manner one breaks a person of the habit of sleeping at any moment. The word is also figuratively employed, and in this case means affront, mortification."

Delvau's "Dictionnaire de la Langue Verte," 1889. We find “Camouflement: disguise because the 'camoufle' of instruction and education deceives one.” "Camoufler, to instruct oneself, to serve oneself with the camoufle of intellectual and moral light." It should be remarked that in thieves' slang “camoufle” means candle. Delvau also gives “camouflerise," reflective verb, to disguise oneself. "Camouflage" is not given.

"Camouflement," disguise, is in Larchey's "Excentricites du Langage" (1865) and in Vidocqu's "Les Voleura" (1837).

Let Us look at more modern dictionaries. "Camouflage" is not in Marchand's "Modern Parisian Slang: Argot des Tranchees,” but "camouflet," a rebuke, is listed, also "se camoufler,” to make up one's face.

"Camouflage"' is not in Jean La Rue’s "Dictionnaire d'Argot."

We find "Camouflage" in Aristide Bruant's "L.'Argot au XXe Siecle," vol. I. Francals-Argot, as an equivalent of "Deguisement." The second volume, Argot-Francais, has not been published. Bruant is dead.

"Camouflage" with its present meaning was a French slang term in 1901 and probably for some years before.

We find "Camouflage" in the "Dictionnaire des Termes Militaires et de l'Argot Poilu," published in Paris (1916). “Camoufle. A lamp. Painting the face." "Camoufler. To make a ‘Camoufle,’ to paint." "Camouflage. The action of painting." “Camoufleur. An artist that transforms, by modifying the disposition, the general aspects, immovable things, cannon, anything exposed to the aim of the enemy.

Then there is the huge “Dictionnaire de la Langue Verte." by Hector France, a volume of nearly 600 pages, quarto, with three columns to the page. "Camouflage. The art of making up." There Is this quotation from Guy Tomel's “Le Bas du Pave Parisien": "The police show themselves very reserved on the subject of ‘camouflage,' because each one of them has his own methods which he does not wish to divulge; also because they make their transformations instinctively and would have all the trouble in the world to join theory with practice.” France also defines a "camoufle" (acute accent on the "e") as “a man wearing a false beard, or otherwise disguised." A "camoufleur" is a disguised policeman. "Camoufler la bibine" is to sell adulterated drinks.


It thus appears that the word “camouflage" did not come into the French language during the present war, and is not purely military slang. It is certainly as old as 1901; it was used in connection with policemen and with actors. Aristide Bruant defined it in 1901. Hector France began the publication of his dictionary, in bi-monthly parts, in 1898. "Camoufage" is on the 35th page.

In defining "se camoufler," the definition "se maquiller" is usually given. “Se maquiller" means to paint one's face, to put on rouge, to ruddle, to make up.

In his learned "Etudes de Philologie comparee sur l’Argot" (1856), Francisque-Michel, discussing the old word “camouflet,” says that as the smoke was usually blown into the face of sleeping lackeys, the word soon came to mean a flagrant affront, a great mortification. Pray, in what sense was the word used by the anonymous author of "L'Histoire de Camouflet, souverain potentat de l'empire d' Equivopolis” (1751)?

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

SALE book bundle / free shipping

 

no camouflage wig / as bald as the dome of St. Paul's

Above Anon, World War I dazzle-camouflaged steamship at wharf in Richmond CA, c1918. Digitally colorized.

•••

E.V. Lucas in The Sphere, reprinted as COINAGE OF WAR WORDS in Vinton Review (Vinton IA), November 14, 1918, p. 3—

[As for camouflage] I cannot remember any instance of a foreign word, so peculiarly un-English as this, not only being so rapidly and universally adopted but also being so rarely mispronounced. I still often overhear knots of men who in their talk about the war refer to the Kay-ser, and the utter anglicization of French battle names by public house military experts is perhaps the most charmIng feature of their discussions; but camouflage remains as French in sound in this country as in its own, and every one uses it. Here, however, it has become so elastic as to be the recognized form for any kind of pretence whatsoever.…

I have been astonished recently by examples of the hold of camouflage on all types of mind. Journeying the other day from a Sussex station to London, under war conditions—fifty of us standing all the way in the guard's van—I had some talk with the guard, who, on removing his cap to wipe a heated brow, revealed himself as bald as the dome of St. Paul’s. It caused him no distress: some men, he remarked, would camouflage it with a wig, but not he. Earlier In the day, my host, a vigilant and suspicious reader of the press, had dismissed an optimistic article on current events as "mere camouflage.” The next day a schoolboy back for the holidays two weeks in advance of the proper time said that a scare of measles had brought about that desired result; at least, that is what the schoolmaster said, but personally he thought it was just camouflage to cover the fact that grub was getting so jolly expensive. And a little Iater a facetious gentleman near me in a restaurant asked the wine waiter to bring him some claret instead of the camouflaged water which he called whisky. Probably the word is in the nursery by this time.

Note As some people will remember, British humorist E.V. Lucas teamed up with George Morrow in 1911 to produce a delightful book of mismatched text and pictures, titled What A Life!, a subject I have talked about in a recent essay on digital montages, but also in a video talk about the logic of comic invention.

a yankee doodle dante—we crave your condescension

camouflaged figures

Louis Untermeyer, Bygones: The Recollections of Louis Untermeyer. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965. Excerpts from various pages as noted—

[Untermeyer’s father] was a trouble-evader and a peacemaker; it was easy to take advantage of him, which everyone did, especially his children. He was not a talker; he relied on the stereotypes of conversation, and even there he fell into malapropisms. Something cheap was not worth “a hell of beans” and a pitiful occurrence was “heartrendering.” He was never sure whether the first line of his favorite Harrigan and Hart [musical comedy writing team] song was “We crave your kind attention” or “We crave your condescension” (p. 7).

Influenced by the sprightly British journalist-essayist-novelist-poet G.K. Chesterton, I was much given to a style that employed epigrammatic checks and balances, appositions, paradoxes, and puns. I remember dismissing a rather commonplace collection of Gaelic poetry as “A Child’s Garden of Erse” and characterizing the author of an abortive American epic as “A Yankee Doodle Dante.” I referred to a Dowson-Beardsley pastiche as being “less erotic than Pierrotic.” I inquired, since much of the Restoration comedy took place in elegant country houses, was it not a comedy of manors? (p. 44).

It is as a poet that I most resent those resentful of puns, for the pun is, per se, a poetic device. Poetry is essentially a form of play, a play of metaphor, a play of rhyme. The pun is another form of syllabic playfulness, a matching of sounds that, like rhyme, are similar yet not quite the same—a matchng and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance. Whatever form it takes, searching or silly, the pun springs spontaneously from the same combination of wit and imagination which speeds the poetic impulse (p. 45).

“T.S. Eliot and I have our similarities and our differences,” he [poet Robert Frost] wrote to me, “We are both poets and we both like to play. That’s the similarity. The difference in this: I like to play euchre; he likes to play Eurcharist” (p. 46).

When an interviewer, pointing to a world constantly at war, asked [G.K.] Chesterton whether Christianity had failed, Chesterton replied, “No, it has not failed. Christianity has not yet been tried” (p. 72). 

•••

NOTE  Embedded figures are discussed in this posted short video.

the scintillations of your wit, lambent but innoucous

Above This strikingly-costumed figure (pre-camouflage, but visually “dazzling” nevertheless) is extracted from a theatrical poster from 1897. It was an advertisement for Wang, a comic operetta first performed in New York City. 

The title role, as shown here, was played by Broadway actor William DeWolf Hopper (1858-1935), an outsized personality and—at 6 foot 5 inches and 230 pounds—an outsized physical presence as well. He had a powerful booming voice, and a boundless sense of humor. 

His celebrity was due in part to the popularity of his on-stage recitations of the widely known baseball poem by Ernest Thayer, titled “Casey at the Bat.” Having married and divorced with unusual frequency (not to mention reputed affairs), he was sometimes said to have been the “husband of his country.” 

His fifth wife was the famous gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper, and their son was the actor William Hopper (William DeWolf Hopper, Jr.), who played a detective named Paul Drake in the Perry Mason televison series.

•••

Guiseppe Garibaldi—

Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune.

•••

A.D. Godley—

What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!

•••

Edward Meyrick Goulburn—

Let the scintillations of your wit be like the coruscations of summer lightning, lambent but innoucuous.

visual ambiguity / metaphors, camouflage, visual puns

Anon, French postcard, portrait of Bismarck

Today, I ran across an online essay (it's been online since 2017, and I've only just now found it) by American designer/illustrator  Catherine A. Moore, titled Seriously Funny: Metaphor and the Visual Pun. It is a well-written overview of ambiguity, especially puns and metaphors, both word- and image-based. 

The term ambiguity is commonly misunderstood. It doesn't imply a lack of meaning, but refers instead to the potential of multiple meanings. It comes from the same etymological root (ambi, meaning "both" or "on both sides") as ambidextrous, ambivalence, ambitious, ambience, amphitheater, and so on. In practice, it has lots to do with embedded figures (such as the pun-embellished portrait of Otto, Prince of Bismarck, shown above), with metaphors, and, by extension, camouflage.

Moore's essay is a wonderfully wide-ranging discussion of various kinds of word play, from which she moves on to examples of extraordinary visual puns (dare we call them image play) by such masterful practitioners as Christoph Niemann, Guy Billout, and, of course, René Magritte.

Achtung! Beware of another camouflaged dog!

Above This is the cover page of the inaugural issue of a German satirical magazine called Kladderadatsch. It was founded 1848 in Berlin by David Kalisch and Albert Hofmann. There is a story (true or not) that Kalisch and the magazine's staff were having dinner one evening, in part to reach an agreement about the name for the magazine.

During dinner, a dog knocked over a stack of plates, at the sound of which someone at the table said "Kladderadatsch!" which is the German sound for "Crash!" Kalisch loved it (one wonders if he was inspired by the French magazine Le Charivari, meaning "street noise" and/or The London Charivari) and decided to use that expression as the magazine's name.

In the top center of the cover is a drawing of a smiling boy (see below) by Wilhelm Scholz, in which, in tribute to the noisy dog, there is a drawing of the dog hidden (camouflaged, embedded) in the boy's cheek to the left of his nose. That same drawing continued to be on the cover for forty years.

Find the hidden dog

See also: Bevis Hillier, Cartoons and Caricatures. London: Studio Vista, 1970.

Jabberwocky Meets Kaiserwocky | WWI Parody

Above John Tenniel's illustration of the Jabberwock.

•••

Aha! Now here's a great find. It's a terribly funny take-off on Lewis Carroll's famous nonsense poem titled "Jabberwocky," which he published in Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872). For those who have never heard of Alice In Wonderland or Lewis Carroll, I haven't any comment. But, to appreciate the parody, you have to have read the original poem.  It goes as follows—

JABBERWOCKY  |  Lewis Carroll

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

'Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!'

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood a while in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

And now on to the parody (author uncredited), called "Kaiserwocky," which was apparently published in the New York Evening Post, then reprinted in The Minneapolis Morning Star Tribune, May 16, 1918, p. 14, as follows—

KAISERWOCKY  |  Anon

'Twas Marnen, and the tommy ats
Did wyem secate in their trench;
All belgiumed with the tinny-hats,
And blank-blank potsdam french.

“Beware the Camouflage, my son!
The Cootie’s bite, the Barbwire’s scratch,
The Ausespiel’s place in the sun;
Verbote the redcrost patch!”

He took his kruppy in his hands:
Long time a blighty foe he sought,
Some scrappy papered Soixaute-quinze,
All poilued in its thought.

And as he kultured his moustache,
The Camouflage rheims through the wood.
And fraicaised o’er with rongetnoir,
Alsaced him where he stood.

Einzwei! Einzwei! And high and dry
He kieled that camouflage gun;
Then prussly monocled his eye
And taubel to Pop when done.

“And host thou kieled the Camouflage!
Come to my lefty arm, my boy!
Dertag is won—’tis au verdun!”
He vonklucked in his joy.

’Twas persching, and the tammy ats
Were numans landing from their tench;
All sammied were the tinney-hats,
The Kamrads deutschly blench.

Camouflage as an Agricultural Food Source

WWI workers applying ship camouflage (c1918)

Above Over the years, we've located perhaps a dozen World War I-era photographs of dazzle-camouflaged ships in the process of being painted. Here is yet another (source unknown), in which workers are shown applying various paint colors to large areas, as designated by chalk lines and, in this case, even the name of the paint color.

•••

The following are edited excerpts from a humorous question-and-answer column, called ALL SORTS by Newton Newkirk, published in the Boston Post, September 17, 1917, p. 8. It begins with a spurious inquiry from an anonymous New England farmer and is followed by an equally fraudulent answer from the column's author—

QUESTION: …Is camouflage raised from seed or settings? How does camouflage compare in nutritive value with other vegetables? Can camouflage be canned and how? When is the best time to plant camouflage? Please tell me the etiquette of eating camouflage…

ANSWER: …It has been a long time since I sat down to a mess of succulent camouflage like mother used to cook. Your ignorance concerning this well-known vegetable amazed me—I was of the opinion that every agriculturist was familiar with camouflage.

Of course you know what ensilage is? Yes? Well, it will perhaps give you some idea what camouflage is when I say that ensilage bears no resemblance whatever to camouflage—you would never mistake one for the other. Neither does cabbage (accent on the last syllable) belong to the same family as camouflage. Camouflage—at least all the camouflage I have seen—grows more luxuriantly and is much more nutritious than persiflage. Some folks might prefer the flavor of persiflage, but give me camouflage every time.

Camouflage is grown from blubs—I mean bulbs. One pound of camouflage contains more nutrient than half a ton of baled hay. Yes, camouflage can be canned, but I can't go into the canning now. Never plant camouflage until after the frost is out of the ground. If you plant it in January your crop will be a failure. It is good etiquette to eat camouflage until you feel you have had a genteel sufficiency…