In the Private Voices corpus of American Civil War letters, the term pill is often used to mean bullet, although this slang term is at least a century older. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Pill Meant Bullet”
One term that keeps surfacing in the Civil War letters I’m reading online is the term pills.
And by pills, the soldiers didn’t mean the things that you take as medicine.
They talked about Lincoln’s pills or Abe’s pills.
And by that, they meant…
Bullets.
Bullets.
They were talking about lead pills.
Wow, lead pills.
Yeah.
That has pill referring to ammunition of a kind.
It goes back a long ways.
It goes back to at least the 1600s, referred to cannonballs.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah, and various times in history it has referred to naval mines, you know, water mines, or depth charge, bombs from the air.
Referring just to bullets goes back to the 1700s easily.
And then kind of fast forward to the 1930s where you’ve got like the detective and fiction, like the Dashiell Hammett sort of thing.
And actually in The Thin Man, he uses pills to mean bullets.
So at that point, it kind of sounds more like tough guy slang, but it’s got hundreds of years history before it reaches Dashiell Hammett.
Oh, that’s fascinating.
Yeah.
Very cool.
So that’s the nice thing about these letters.
They’re a snapshot in time that plug into the larger history of language and our culture.
Indeed.
