Using keywords: a model

"Another index of the prevailing innocence is a curious prophylaxis of language. One could use with security words which a few years later, after the war, would constitute obvious double entendres. One could say intercourse, or erection, or ejaculation without any risk of evoking a smile or a leer. Henry James's innocent employment of the word tool is as well known as Browning's artless misapprehensions about the word twat. Even the official order transmitted from British headquarters to the armies at 6:50 on the morning of November 11, 1918 [the day of the armistice] warned that 'there will be no intercourse of any description with the enemy.' Imagine daring to promulgate that at the end of the Second War! In 1901 the girl who was to become Christopher Isherwood's mother and whose fiance was going to be killed in the war could write in her diary with no self-consciousness: 'Was bending over a book when the whole erection [a toque hat she had been trimming] caught fire in the candles and was ruined. So vexed!' She was an extraordinarily shy, genteel, proper girl, and neither she nor her fiance read anything funny or anything not entirely innocent and chaste into the language of a telegram he once sent her after a long separation: 'THINKING OF YOU HARD.' In this world, 'he ejaculated breathlessly' was a tag in utterly innocent dialogue rather than a moment in pornographic description."

From Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 23.