Questions upon reading book by Royal Marine

Matt Croucher GC, was awarded the George Cross after an event during a intelligence gathering mission which took place inside a Taliban bomb makers compound in Afghanistan. After breaking a tripwire attatched to a grenade, he jumped down with his day pack against it, to protect his comrades. After absorbing the blast, and carrying on with his day to the point where he actually ended up dropping the bomb maker, his unit and thier superiors decided that he ought to be recognised for his all out balls. Too bloody right!

Since then Croucher has written an account of his time in the Royal Marine Commandos, with the assistance of some bloke who writes professionally, the name of whom I forget, and is largely unimportant.

I came by this book when I was thumbing through a few volumes from a charity book stand in a DIY store in Essex. I purchased the book for a very reasonable thirty pence, and proceeded to read the account of Matt Crouchers career behind enemy lines, and was of course very impressed by his account of things. However, one thing about the book, or rather, about the language used, struck me as very odd.

I had no idea until I read that book, that Royal Marines have an entire language all of thier own, which contains nonsense words like "gopping" and "pongo", not to mention some other rather bizzare words. The question I have to ask is, does being trained to fight, kill and die for your country automatically result in an inability to continue with the Oxford Dictionary version of the English language, or is this merely an affectation? From whence come these utterly unecessary slang terms? What purpose is served by these gibberish phrases?

Anyone have any ideas? I would ask a Marine, but I respect the crap out of them, and wouldnt want to cause offense to what must be something of a tradition amongst thier ranks.

They'll be words that have a specific meaning to them and are quick to say and not liable to much misunderstanding as they won't be used in any region of the country as a local dialect and thus when asking for an airstrike to be called in you don't get some hair dye dropped in due to the radio guy thinks you need to redo your perm as it sounded like hair stripe

One mainframe i worked on had a part of its boot called the "grope" where it had a look at what was connected to it...mentioning that in the wrong company would get you some very funny looks when you mentioned that groping had failed / worked to those not of the knowledge, and never mind the 101 other things such as leaders or a gender benders etc

reply to post by Maxatoria


Hmmm... thing is, there were an awful lot of these in the book. So many were there, that there was actually a two page section of the index given over to explaining some of thier meanings. This leads me to believe that there is a certain element of tradition in some of these phrases.

I understand what you mean though. Its like when a car mechanic at a bar starts talking about a "big end" and wonders why everyone is looking at him funny.