For example, Mick wrote to his parents and asked "This is incalculable, but it may just as well be incalculably small as incalculable large, so why worry?" Going by this new structure, it can be deduced that Lubbock's question could now read "is a kid's sorrow not a very real and great grief when it loses its doll?" In an earlier letter, Lubbock had written another letter in which he told his parents he would have no regrets if he "falls" in battle
Essentially, by fall he meant die. However, even though the soldiers may have come up with the term to save their loved ones back home from the stigma of death, the term is commonly used in present-day English to mean die especially in the military and police fraternity. This is also a representation of how the soldiers changed the development of English. In the same letter, he also tells his parents not to allow things get "black" for them should he fall. In this sense, black is what earlier English termed as gloom. However, the term black is also still commonly used to refer to gloom. .
Most of the words the soldiers developed and used in letters were descriptions of their unfamiliar circumstances and environments, their war experiences, fears, desires and emotions. Further, the first armies that can really be referred to as literate and, given their large number it is evident that the letters they wrote influenced notable changes to language fought the two wars. The influence was mainly from interactions by soldiers both on the Western Front as well as the in the Middle East campaign. After the wars, they introduced the new terms they created in the war to the general population. The spelling of words before WWI, a period in which the number of literate people was relatively fewer, cannot exactly be said to have been standardised because languages did not have fixed orthography systems. This is supported by the letters archived from WWI and WWII, which suggest that the soldiers spelled words according to the influences of regional pronunciations and, to some extent, personal preference.
