Why was World War I called The Great War?

the name was coined shortly after (or perhaps even during) the war, to distinguish it from the various pissy wars that had been fought in the fifty to a hundred years before it.

xpost - even funnier, it actually lasted 116 years!

I thought the same thing, Chris.

-- Elvis Telecom (quartzcit...), November 13th, 2006 4:26 PM. (Chris Barrus) (later)

hahahaha yeah and the most famous battle in it happened after the war was over.

Others that pop up in my head from time to time:

- the guy who claims to have just driven over from the next city, but there's a baby on the hood of his car, which should be really hot

- this weird one where Encyclopedia can tell this woman at a restaurant is actually a man in disguise, based on some batshit rule about how women always get the seat facing the room, and men sit across from them???

- "if the window were broken from the outside, the glass would be in the room"

- "it's impossible for a person to use his left hand to stick his mumblety-peg knife in his right jeans pocket while running"

The term First World War was first used in the 1920s. So-called not because people knew there was going to be a second one, but because it was the first time a war had taken place on a global scale.

"Great" meaning "large" or "immense"/
We use it in the pejorative sense"

- suspect claims he kept some document between page 97 and 98 of his favorite book - but books don't have odd-even facing pages, apparently ever...busted!

- something about "an arrow flight away"/"a narrow flight away"...ends with EB bootin it up the stairs, i think.

i recall this one weekly. because i am always late and sort of running while finishing dressing etc. it is so not impossible, unless you are running very fast and/or have extremely short arms. i do it all the time.

-"All block lettering looks the same" or something like that ... in the context of shredding some graphological defense, maybe?

Also, "civil war" - what's so civil about it?

and

Encyclopedia Brown: The Complete Casebook

...Please turn to the next thread to see the answer.

What does it say about me that, when I first read this, I thought it meant he'd hit a baby on the way over and it was wedged the front of his car and would be really hot if he's actually driven all that way?

I know this because I read it in one of Campbell's old Pears Cyclopedias. I didn't know it beforehand. In fact, it had never occured to me. I would be rubbish at being an ace attorney with the wildest cross-examining skills in town if I couldn't even wonder about THAT contradiction...

I see.

a friend claims to have once been in a history tutorial where someone in all seriousness asked from where Kings and Queens got the numbers after their names.

-- Bhumibol Adulyadej (starrysdarkmaterial...), November 14th, 2006.

i'm being thick, i don't get you here. i don't know when that name came in, though it's possible it came in before the war started, given that everyone knew it was going to. but they could have got by calling it just 'the war'; as they did with the first one quite often.

Hint: it wasn't WWII, and it was more than just 'the war'!

I am surprised not more people know this - I felt really thick when I realised I didn't know.

yeahbut isn't it only later convention that says 01/09/39 is when 'it' started anyway? japan had been getting into it with china (and therefore teh brits) way before then; and even as of that date the ussr was involved.

and who can forget the battle of the river plate?

it only needed US involvement to make it as worldly as ww1.

given that the initial combatants included the British and French empires, it would seem not inappropriate to call it a world conflict.

'operation polish storm'

This is cheating as it's the same source where Starry's got her info from!

I don't. Someone please tell me.

that's not batshit, it's an iron law.

Kevin Coyne wrote a song about that once...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1E_H9dBwws

I’m pretty lucky that I don’t live/work somewhere where I’m likely to be challenged for not adequately celebrating the awesomeness of war and pinning a shitty piece of prison slave labour-produced tat to my clothes

As a happy consequence of this I have completely forgotten World War I

I don't know where that actually happens though, if it happens at all. I saw my first ever white poppy yesterday.

ban either tuomas

BREAKING: World leaders have missed the exact moment to commemorate the armistice that ended World War I.

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 11, 2018

i mean come on

at least putin can say "pre-gregorian calender mate, no one understands that bollox"

You've got one thing to do and you can't even do that.

you had 11 11/11 job

lol

Putin can piss off those weirdo Romanov cultists as much as he likes. though I'm not sure they gaf either tbh!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DruEouKXgAIIfpj.jpg

Otto Dix otm

otm indeed.

Wonder if that etching was an influence on the editors who created the opening credits of the BBCs 1964 The Great War series.
I watched it all during a week of deep depression in 2014, it didn't help.

So why is Theresa May in London today?

brexit

World War I, hence not all leaders in attendance are European. But I'm probably putting too much thought into this.

i thought this was one correct lesson to the very high % of usa that don't understand it this way

1. It can't be underlined enough how important the First World War is to France's national self-conception. Trump's failure to attend the memorial is a huge diplomatic insult.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 10, 2018

well, i didn't mean the "insult" part, i meant the scale of ww1 relative to ww2 in popular perceptions

I was somewhat astonished to read casualty numbers in WWI vs those in WWII: overall the total number killed in the latter dwarfs the former but France was fully engaged in battle for all of WWI vs their swift surrender in WWII. Once people also understand what France went through the first time it becomes easier to understand why there was not as much drive to fight Germany to the death again (a nation that remained in the throes of a violent nationalistic sickness that one defeat wasn’t enough to cast away.)

I doubt trump knows a single thing about that war

i remember my dad at a memorial day parade in the 70s trying to explain to 5 or 6 y/o me why the (very few) wwi veterans were so important and notable because of the immensity of the great war in world history.

His wife is Slovenian yet he still blamed the Baltic states for the crimes they committed in Yugoslavia. 'Cause it sounds just like the Balkans, duh!

xp

I've heard it said before that the failure of The Maginot Line and surrender of France was much more down to a widespread fatalistic malaise amongst the French military than any stroke of genius from Manstein. It might not tell the full story, but I think there is some substance to that.

And in France they still have 1200 square kilometres of land that is still a century later, an uninhabitable toxic wasteland. Tho I'd have let it slide if they had invaded England and done the same to Middlesbrough.

And in France they still have 1200 square kilometres of land that is still a century later, an uninhabitable toxic wasteland.

Remember learning about this some years back. Like a pre-nuclear Chernobyl.

the only difference is that Chernobyl has become quite a nature reserve in some parts and you read stories of people moving back there recently. Zone Rouge is still lifeless and deadly, it's quite mindblowing really!

"According to the Sécurité Civile agency in charge, at the current rate no fewer than 700 more years will be needed to clean the area completely."

So why is Theresa May in London today?

Putin RSVP'd first is my punt tbh

"Remembrance Day: In pictures"

meh, no decent Up The Arse Corner contenders this year.

I'd have let it slide if they had invaded England and done the same to Middlesbrough

how would we tell?

no such thing as "uninhabitable toxic wasteland" in Real England!

so this Peter Jackson doc is on bbc2 tonight and its just mindblowing seeing all this footage in high-ish def colour.

how is that P-Jax doc? I saw a trailer and it is really something else seeing the film transformed in this manner, hoping it's worth a view and isn't just a gimmick on which to hinge a thinly sketched statement.

I thought it was very bland + heavily sentimentalised Our Boys type claptrap, and aside from the old movie stock tarted up by CGI - with absolutely nothing interesting to say and with no coherent narrative. Although I'm sure it made Tommy Robinson cry into his beer. Just basically the type of shite you'd see playing on one of the screens at the imperial war museum.

Saw most of The Long Shadow repeated on BBC4 the last few weeks. That was interesting and challenging even when I was sceptical of some of the interpretations he made.

I want a full book about this story.

I want a movie too. I want the whole damn thing.

a gay love story of the 1st world war’s year.

[thread by @guillemclua im just a translator]. pic.twitter.com/I3CkgKd1EO

— maaayyy. (@brendonsexual) December 7, 2018

Well, the chances are probably quite high..

https://guillemclua.com/comunicado-sobre-el-hilo-de-twitter-emilyxaver/

Rather!