Random quote....
Mar. 3rd, 2021 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brooksmosesThis coming from looking at some conversations about a time traveler from 1918 finding out to their great distress that the war they'd just been through was now called "World War One", seeing a bunch of argument in the comment section that was largely unencumbered by facts, and then poking at Google's book search to see what facts there actually were.
From a Sept. 18, 1918, diary entry by Charles à Court Repington, published 1920 in his book The First World War, 1914-1918: "I saw Major Johnstone, the Harvard Professor who is here to lay the bases of an American History. We discussed the right name of the war. I said that we called it now The War but that this could not last. The Napoleonic War was The Great War ... I suggested that The World War was a shade better title, and finally we mutually agreed to call it The First World War in order to prevent the millennium folk from forgetting that the history of the world was the history of war."
"World War One" as such does seem to have been rather a bit later, though, and probably not until the second one was happening. Especially once one ignores sentences ending with "World War" and followed by sentences beginning with "One".
From a Sept. 18, 1918, diary entry by Charles à Court Repington, published 1920 in his book The First World War, 1914-1918: "I saw Major Johnstone, the Harvard Professor who is here to lay the bases of an American History. We discussed the right name of the war. I said that we called it now The War but that this could not last. The Napoleonic War was The Great War ... I suggested that The World War was a shade better title, and finally we mutually agreed to call it The First World War in order to prevent the millennium folk from forgetting that the history of the world was the history of war."
"World War One" as such does seem to have been rather a bit later, though, and probably not until the second one was happening. Especially once one ignores sentences ending with "World War" and followed by sentences beginning with "One".