In spite of declaring himself fit for war flying, the dud weather awarded Greg another day on the ground:
Diary
Monday June 10th 1918. Pretty dud day; did not fly.
“Dud” was always one of Greg’s favourite adjectives (and nouns) of disapprobation. It was a word that was rapidly rising in popularity during the First World War, as this Ngram graph from Google Books shows:
For an explanation of Ngrams, click here (opens in new tab). This Ngram was generated using the corpus of English books (British and American) between 1800 and 2008.