Chrysti The Wordsmith: Dough Boy

Greetings and welcome to Christie the wordsmith the slang term doughboy was applied to us infantry men who fought in the Mexican-American War the Civil War and the First World War. The source of doughboy has been lost in the haze of history but military historians and word watchers have offered various theories on its origin. Some suggest the first doughboys were 19th century enlisted soldiers who purportedly applied white clay dust to the piping of their uniforms to keep it bright but the dust thickened in the rain congealing into blobs of dough like clay that clung to the soldier's uniforms. Another explanation involves dust as well. This time the pottery earth of Southwest Texas foot soldiers traversing the Rio Grande were often begrimed with the dust of Adobe soil mounted troops called the infantry soldiers Adobe's then Dobies and finally after a few phonetic adjustments doughboys. General George Armstrong Custer

his wife Libby provides the next etymological possibility for this disputed term in her 1888 memoir Tenting on the plains. She writes a doughboy is a small round donut served to sailors on shipboard early in the civil war. The term is applied to the large globular brass buttons of the infantry uniform from which it passed by natural transition to the infantry men themselves. I'm Christi the wordsmith. Good day for divorce Christie the wordsmith is sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Zoot enterprises a high tech firm in Bozeman Montana offering challenging careers and innovative solutions for the financial services industry. Zoot web dot com.