Most of us, journalists included, like to be part of the in-crowd.
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We like to appear knowledgeable when people are discussing that disallowed try last weekend or the latest soap on television.
And sometimes we feel like nerds if we don’t use the right vocabulary for the occasion.
Take chopper, for instance.
Most of us have grown up with knowledge of helicopters and some of us have even ridden in them.
My one and only trip in a helicopter came a week before it crashed into a petrol station in a country town with fortunately little damage apart from the pilot’s pride.
But for years everybody was content to call a helicopter a helicopter.
Then one evening while I was watching the television news the young newsreader chose to say a “chopper” had been used in a medical evacuation.
My first thought was “what was wrong with helicopter?”
The use of the word chopper in a serious television news report seemed a jarring intrusion, but probably caused by my inexperience in the ways of the world.
From then, the word chopper seemed to jump out from every newspaper, radio and television report.
Poor old helicopter had been confined to the rubbish bin.
And to think helicopters had been around for so long.
Leonardo da Vinci had conceived in the 15th century the idea of a human-carrying helicopter, even though I’m sure he didn’t call it a helicopter, let alone a chopper.
The history books say the flight of the first fully controllable helicopter took place in 1936, in Germany.
But I was more interested in chopper.
The word was being used as far back as the 16th century, but not regarding any type of aircraft.
A chopper was simply a person who chopped things into pieces. Shakespeare in Henry IV referred to a bread-chopper.
Over the years the word had various uses, describing a person in the lumber trade, a butcher’s cleaver, even a device for interrupting an electric current.
Other uses of the word found include
- a machine for chopping something: a straw chopper.
- a device for regularly interrupting an electric current or a beam of light or particles.
- (choppers) informal teeth. he flashes his choppers back at me.
- informal a helicopter. fog had delayed the landing of his chopper.
- informal a type of motorcycle with high handlebars and the front-wheel fork extended forwards.
A wartime machine gun or gunner was also called a chopper.
But it seems the use of the word chopper to describe a helicopter can be traced to the Korean War.
The earliest reference I could find came in the New York Herald Tribune of December 16, 1951: “The Korean War has added some new words to the American soldier’s vocabulary … chopper: helicopter.”
A few months later the New York Times reported that oil and gas producers were using a “chopper” to patrol long pipelines.
The big Oxford defines the word as slang, originating in the USA.
Why did Australian journalists decide to use it? Who knows?
Probably the pioneers in this use of American slang simply wanted to display their superior knowledge. The noun chopper, however, has gone the way of so many other nouns and has been adopted as a verb.
I have to point the finger at a television news report again, but the other night the newsreader announced that an accident victim had been “choppered” to hospital.
Visit: lauriebarber.com or lbword.com.au
Laurie Barber has been writing the My Word column since 1995. It has appeared on a weekly basis in newspapers throughout Australia and New Zealand. He has worked on city and regional newspapers.
