During the three years between its release in 1972 and the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam in 1975, the state-run socialist media of most countries of Europe outlawed Don McLean’s American Pie, unless the word “American” was dubbed (usually very badly, I might add) with the word “Revolutionary”. Despite this intrusion, the song reached number 1 in the hit parade of all countries but Finland, where it was pipped to the top spot by Pekka and Bekka performing the somewhat less memorable Che Guevara Bingy Bang Bong.
British royals freedom-fried themselves back in 1917. Seems there were all sort of interrelationships among aristocrats (if I remember right, the Kaiser was Queen Victoria’s nephew), so to placate anti-German sentiment British royals went from being Saxe-Coburg-Gothas to Windsors. And the Battenberg branch of royals became Mountbattens.
According to this site, Prince Philip was originally a Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksberg before the surname was changed to Mountbatten, though historians have speculated that the real reason for the alteration was to save money on personalized stationery.
The terms were used pretty much equally for the same food from the 1870’s until WWI. In my searching of newspaper cites, it would appear that the term French toast was probably being used more frequently in the years preceding 1914. But during WWI, certainly German toast lost out to * French toast*.
As a note of no particular interest, the French call French bread “pain perdu”, or “lost bread”; in other words, a dish made from a baguette that’s over the hill.
samclem & anson, I’ll bow to your research that indicates that it was called French toast before WWI, but my point is still correct in that the term German toast, which was also used before then, was (as you note) pretty much abandoned afterward.
What Snopes says is false, is false. Kato was always a Filipino of Japanese ancestry. After Pearl Harbor they just stopped talking about it. They didn’t change his origin, they just ignored it.
American Ace of Aces in WW1 Eddie Rickenbacker’s name at birth was Rickenbacher.
He changed it during the war by writing a letter to a friend back home, and signing it “Eddie Rickenbac[k]er.” The friend, who was a newspaper columnist, headlined his next column with “Eddie Rickenbacker has taken the Hun out of his name!” (“Hun” being a common term in the war years referring to a German.)
This is another urban legend. I had always thought so, but decided to test my theory now that we have newspaper databases to search myriad newspapers for this kind of oft-repeated anecdote.
It just ain’t true!
I am only talking about searching US average newspaper for the time. Perhaps the UK might be different.
If you use the term “sauerkraut” and search the newspapers in Newspaperarchive from 1890-1913, you get over 5,000 hits. If you again search for “sauerkraut” using 1914-1918 as your base, you get 2,700 hits.
If you use “victory cabbage” for a search term from 1914-1918, you get 18 hits.
Does this give you a clue that this was NOT a term used to replace “sauerkraut” during WWI?
In using ProQuest to search the 6 major US newspapers, I get 2 hits during WWII for “victory cabbage” but none during WWI.
Another factoid repeated on the web that is NOT true.
On the other hand, I used “liberty cabbage” and got 368 hits in NewspaperArchive. Since I’m not a member, I can’t vouch for the year; but it’s hardly a UL.
(As I understand it, “liberty” was a WWI term; a bit of cynicism appears to have set in between the wars, and during WWII we settled for “victory” instead.)
Well, not that many people actually asked for Freedom Fries at the counter of our local fast food places either.
Just because the average American didn’t fall for it, doesn’t mean that the philosophical predecessors of the morons who wanted freedom fries didn’t have their moment in the sun.
Using Newspaperarchive for only the years 1917-1918(which would have been an important time for Americans), indeed the term “Liberty measles” seems to have been a term that was important as opposed to “German measles.”
“German measles” was twice as frequently cited as “Liberty measles” in 1917-18 but that’s not terribly significant using my database. Probably.
I had no idea his name was so bonkers. He’s a lot of Greek, too, but that never go into the name it seems.
