In the "Major General's Song" in "The Pirates of Penzance" by Gilbert and Sullivan, the Major-General boasts that when, among many other bits and pieces of seemingly elementary or irrelevant information, he "know(s) precisely what is meant by commissariat", he will be the best officer the army has ever seen (satirizing 19th century British officers' lack of concrete military knowledge). That line can perhaps also be read in a second and very different way; since that work was first performed in 1878, when the Army's Commissariat was at the height of change, as outlined in the paragraph above, the suggestion that the Major-General did not know precisely what the term meant may perhaps have been also a very pointed satirical allusion to that rapidly changing situation.