Originally Posted by
rolling20
'The plane that saved Britain'.
I remember seeing the line of Bulldogs in the hangar @UWAS and asking the CO, 'which plane was his'.
I used the term plane as Flt Lt William Reid VC had used the term to describe his shot up Lanc on the 'World at War'.
Anyway, the CO growled: 'Its not a plane, it's an aeroplane or an aircraft. A plane is something in woodwork!'
Not a good start!
The Oxford English Dictionary has two uses of the offensive term for an aerodyne from 1908:
1908 Aeronaut. Jrnl. Apr. 45/1 The aëroplane was then taken to the Longchamps end of the field, and as soon as the propeller had been set in motion the apparatus dashed off towards Neuilly. After running along the ground for about a hundred mètres the plane lifted, and..rushed through the air for 150 mètres or thereabouts.
1908 Times 1 June 6/1 Mr. Wright refused to give any details on the propeller employed, but on the general construction of the plane he said it was full of movable diversely articulated parts.
The quotation from the Aeronautical Journal has a rich collection of diacritics, along with its use of the deprecated word. The Mr Wright in the second quotation is, without doubt, one of those Wrights, and as he invented it, he might be thought to have some rights (
) over its name.
Richard Hillary also used the five-letter word in 1942.