Authors: Bill Bryson
Made In America
MADE IN AMERICABill Bryson
Illustrations by Bruce McCall
3 A ‘Democratic Phrenzy’: America in the Age of Revolution
5 By the Dawn’s Early Light: Forging a National Identity
6 We’re in the Money: The Age of Invention
8 ‘Manifest Destiny’: Taming the West
9 The Melting-Pot: Immigration in America
10 When the Going was Good: Travel in America
11 What’s Cooking?: Eating in America
12 Democratizing Luxury: Shopping in America
14 The Hard Sell: Advertising in America
16 The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play
17 Of Bombs and Bunkum: Politics and War
20 Welcome to the Space Age: The 1950s and Beyond
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MADE IN AMERICA
A BLACK SWAN BOOK:
9780552998055
First published in Great Britain in 1994 by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
Minerva edition published 1995
Black Swan edition published 1998
Copyright © Bill Bryson 1994
Illustrations copyright © by Bruce McCall
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20 19
Bill Bryson is one of the funniest writers alive. For the past two decades he has been entertaining readers with bravura displays of wit and wisdom. His first book,
The Lost Continent,
in which he put small town America under the microscope, was an instant classic of modern travel literature. Although he has returned to America many times since, never has he been more funny, more memorable, more acute than in his most recent book,
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid,
in which he revisits that most fecund of topics, his childhood. The trials and tribulations of growing up in 1950s America are all here. Des Moines, Iowa, is recreated as a backdrop to a golden age where everything was good for you, including DDT, cigarettes and nuclear fallout. This is as much a story about an almost forgotten, innocent America as it is about Bryson’s childhood. The past is a foreign country. They did things differently then ...
Bill Bryson’s
bestselling travel books include
The Lost Continent, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods
and
Down Under. A Short History of Nearly Everything
was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and won the Aventis Prize for Science Books and the Descartes Science Communication Prize. His latest book is his bestselling childhood memoir,
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.
To David, Felicity, Catherine and Sam
Founding Fathers’ Day, Plymouth Rock
Dame Railway and Her Choo-Choo Court, Cincinnati Ironmongery Fair, 1852
Let us show you for just $1 – how to pack BIG ad ideas into small packages!!
Hoplock’s amazing catch in the 1946 World Series
Wing dining, somewhere over France, 1929
New as nuclear fission and twice as powerful – that’s the new, newer, newest, all-new Bulgemobile!!
Among the many people to whom I am indebted for assistance and encouragement during the preparation of this book, I would like especially to thank Maria Guarnaschelli, Geoff Mulligan, Max Eilenberg, Carol Heaton, Dan Franklin, Andrew Franklin, John Price, Erla Zwingle, Karen Voelkening, Oliver Salzmann, Hobie and Lois Morris, Heidi Du Belt, James Mansley, Samuel H. Beamesderfer, Bonita Lousie Billman, Dr John L. Sommer, Allan M. Siegal, Bruce Corson, and the staffs of the Drake University Library in Des Moines and the National Geographic Society Library in Washington. Above all, and as ever, my infinite, heartfelt thanks and admiration to my wife, Cynthia.
In the 1940s, a British traveller to Anholt, a small island fifty miles out in the Kattegat strait between Denmark and Sweden, noticed that the island children sang a piece of doggerel that was clearly nonsense to them. It went:
Jeck og Jill
Vent op de hill
Og Jell kom tombling after.
The ditty, it turned out, had been brought to the island by occupying British soldiers during the Napoleonic wars, and had been handed down from generation to generation of children for 130 years, even though the words meant nothing to them.
In London, this small discovery was received with interest by a couple named Peter and lona Opie. The Opies had dedicated their lives to the scholarly pursuit of nursery rhymes. No one had put more effort into investigating the history and distribution of these durable but largely uncelebrated components of childhood life. Something that had long puzzled the Opies was the curious fate of a rhyme called ‘Brow Bender’. Once as popular as ‘Humpty Dumpty’ and ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, it was routinely included in
children’s nursery books up until the late eighteenth century, but then it quietly and mysteriously vanished. It had not been recorded in print anywhere since 1788. Then one night as the Opies’ nanny was tucking their children in to bed, they overheard her reciting a nursery rhyme to them. It was, as you will have guessed, ‘Brow Bender’, exactly as set down in the 1788 version and with five lines never before recorded.
Now what, you may reasonably ask, does any of this have to do with a book on the history and development of the English language in America? I bring it up for two reasons. First, to make the point that it is often the little, unnoticed things that are most revealing about the history and nature of language. Nursery rhymes, for example, are fastidiously resistant to change. Even when they make no sense, as in the case of ‘Jack and Jill’ with children on an isolated Danish isle, they are generally passed from generation to generation with solemn precision, like a treasured incantation. Because of this, they are often among the longest-surviving features of any language. ‘Eenie, meenie, minie, mo’ is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, and that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is one of our few surviving links with the very distant past. It not only gives us a fragmentary image of how children were being amused at the time that Stonehenge was built, but tells us something about how their elders counted and thought and ordered their speech. Little things, in short, are worth looking at.
The second point is that songs, words, phrases, ditties – any feature of language at all – can survive for long periods without anyone particularly noticing, as the Opies discovered with ‘Brow Bender’. That a word or phrase hasn’t been recorded tells us only that it hasn’t been recorded, not that it hasn’t existed. The inhabitants of England in the age of Chaucer commonly used an expression,
to be in hide and hair,
meaning to be lost or beyond discovery. But then it disappears from the written record for four hundred years before
resurfacing, suddenly and unexpectedly, in America in 1857 as
neither hide nor hair.
It is dearly unlikely that the phrase went into a linguistic coma for four centuries. So who was quietly preserving it for four hundred years, and why did it so abruptly return to prominence in the sixth decade of the nineteenth century in a country two thousand miles away?
Why, come to that, did the Americans save such good old English words as
skedaddle
and
chitterlings
and
chore,
but not
fortnight
or
heath?
Why did they keep the irregular British pronunciations in words like
colonel
and
hearth,
but go our own way with
lieutenant
and
schedule
and
clerk?
Why in short is American English the way it is?
This is, it seems to me, a profoundly worthwhile and fascinating question, and yet until relatively recent times it is one that hardly anyone thought to ask. Until well into this century serious studies of American speech were left almost entirely to amateurs – people like the heroic Richard Harwood Thornton, an English-born lawyer who devoted years of his spare time to poring through books, journals and manuscripts from the earliest colonial period in search of the first appearances of hundreds of American terms. In 1912 he produced the two-volume
American Glossary.
It was a work of invaluable scholarship, yet he could not find a single American publisher prepared to take it on. Eventually, to the shame of American scholarship, it was published in London.
Not until the 1920s and ’30s, with the successive publications of H. L. Mencken’s incomparable
The American Language,
George Philip Krapp’s
The English Language in America
and Sir William Craigie and James R. Hulbert’s
Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles,
did America at last get books that seriously addressed the question of its language. But by then the inspiration behind many hundreds of American expressions had passed into the realms of the unknowable, so that now no one can say why
Americans
paint the town red, talk turkey, take a powder
or hit practice flies with a
fungo bat.
This book is a modest attempt to examine how and why American speech came to be the way it is. It is not, I hope, a conventional history of the American language. Much of it is unashamedly discursive. You could be excused for wondering what Mrs Stuyvesant Fish’s running over her servant three times in succession with her car has to do with the history and development of the English language in the United States, or how James Gordon Bennett’s lifelong habit of yanking the cloths from every table he passed in a restaurant connects to the linguistic development of the American people. I would argue that unless we understand the social context in which words were formed – unless we can appreciate what a bewildering novelty the car was to those who first encountered it, or how dangerously extravagant and out of touch with the masses a turn-of-the-century business person could be – we cannot begin to appreciate the richness and vitality of the words that make American speech.
