Made In America (83 page)

*10
Not all of them made it. In the late seventeenth century one Thomas Benson secured a contract to transport convicts to the southern colonies of America, but quickly realized it was far simpler and more lucrative to dump them on Lundy, just off the north Devon coast. When he was at last caught, he claimed to have fulfilled his contract because he had taken them ‘overseas’. The magistrates were not persuaded and fined him £7,872. The fate of the stranded convicts is unknown.

*11
Among the inaccuracies, Revere didn’t hang the lanterns in the old North Church, because it wasn’t called that until later; at the time of the Revolution it was Christchurch; he made two rides, not one; and he never made it to Concord, as Longfellow has it, but in fact was arrested along the way. As a historian Longfellow was decidedly hopeless, but as a creator of catch phrases he was in the first rank. Among those that live with us yet: ‘Footprints on the sands of time’, ‘This is the forest primeval’, ‘Into each life some rain must fall’, ‘ships that pass in the night’, and ‘I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, 1 know not where.’

*12
It is, of course, no more than a tendency. Many Americans rhyme
grovel
with
novel,
and all of them say
mercantile, infantile
and
servile
in contradiction of the usual pattern.

*13
Among the words he lower-cased were nature,
creator
and even
God.
Most were later capitalized by the printer.
³⁸

*14
Though John Hancock became immediately famous for his cockily outsize signature on the Declaration, the expression ‘Put your John Hancock here’ for a signature didn’t apparently occur to anyone until 1903.
⁴⁰

*15
‘Peaceably to assemble’ is an interesting and early example of the ginger avoidance of a split infinitive. The curious conviction that infinitives should not be split had only recently come into fashion.

*16
Here, for instance, is Kingsley Amis: ‘An early Congress of the United States debated what language the new nation was to speak. English symbolized the vanquished colonial oppressor, its sole virtue being that everyone used it. As so many of us know, it won the contest, narrowly beating German. There were also votes – not many – for Ancient Greek, as the language of the first democracy, and for a Red Indian language, perhaps Massachusetts or Cree, because it was American.’
(The Amis Collection,
p. 17.)

*17
It was renamed the Smithsonian in honour of a shadowy Englishman named James Smithson. The bastard son of a Duke of Northumberland, Smithson had never been to America and had no known American friends or connections, but he agreed to leave his considerable fortune of £100,000 to the government of the United States if it would name an institution of learning after him.
³³

*18
It is a myth, incidentally, that SOS stands for
save our ship
or
save our souls.
It stands for nothing. It was chosen as a distress signal at an international conference in 1906 not because it had any meaning but because its nine keystrokes (three dots, three dashes, three dots) were simple to transmit.
²⁴

*19
Though Westinghouse is associated in the popular mind with electricity, his initial fame came from the invention of air-brakes for trains. Before this useful development trains could only stop in one of two ways: by having brakemen manually turn a hand-wheel on each car, a laborious process, or by crashing into something solid, like another train.

*20
Curiously, although everyone refers to the object as a
light bulb,
few dictionaries do. The
American Heritage
(first edition) has
lighthouse, light-headed, light meter
and many others in similar vein, but no
light bulb.
If you wish to know what that object is, you must look under
incandescent light, electric light
or
electric lamp. Funk & Wagnalls Revised Standard Dictionary
devotes 6,500 words to
light
and its derivatives, but again makes no mention of
light bulb. Webster’s Second New International
similarly makes no mention of
light bulb.
The third edition does although it has just this to say: ‘light bulb n: incandescent lamp’. For full details you still have to turn to
incandescent lamp.
In my experience, most dictionaries are the same. I can’t explain it.

*21
Nearly all the spellings suggest, incidentally, that the modem American pronunciation of his name, ‘rawly’, is more faithful to the original than the modern British pronunciation, ‘rally’.

*22
It should be pointed out, however, that the closeness of German, Dutch and Yiddish often makes it impossible to ascribe a term positively to one camp.
Spook
and
dumb
could be either Dutch or German in origin, and
nosh, schlemiel
and
phooey,
among others, are as likely to have entered American English from German sources as Yiddish. More often than not, the influence most probably came from two directions simultaneously.

*23
This was nothing compared with the speeds achIeved by steam-powered cars. The great Stanley Steamer reached l27 m.p.h. in 1906. Unfortunately steam cars also tended to be unreliable and to blow up.
²⁸

*24
Not until the 1940s did Sanders pretend to be anything other than the Indiana farm boy fate had made him. But upon being made an honorary colonel by the cherishably named Governor Ruby Laffoon of Kentucky, he took the role to heart. He grew a goatee and ever after affected the manner and attire of a southern gentleman.

*25
And compared with later cereals they certainly were. Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks, introduced in 1953, were 56 per cent sugar.

*26
Or so most books of retailing history say, though it seems an awfully large number. Many modern shopping centres can’t take that many cars.

*27
The most famous 1920s ad of them all didn’t pose a question, but it did play on the reader’s anxiety: ‘They Laughed When I Sat Down, but When I Started to Play ...’ It was originated by the US School of Music in 1925.

*28
And yes, there really was a Dr Scholl. His name was William Scholl, he was a real doctor, genuinely dedicated to the well-being of feet, and they are still very proud of him in his hometown of LaPorte, Indiana.

*29
For purposes of research, I wrote to Procter & Gamble, Gleem’s manufacturer, asking what GL-70 was, but the public relations department evidently thought it eccentric of me to wonder what I had been putting in my mouth all through childhood and declined to reply.

*30
Cricket derives its curious name from an old French word,
criquet,
describing the sound made by a ball striking wood. The insect the cricket also gets its name from
criquet.

*31
The boot in freebooter has nothing to do with footwear. It comes from an old German word, bu¯te, ‘exchange’, which also gave us booty.

*32
It is curious how often we have lost track of the inspiration behind our eponymous words. We have already seen that no one knows who the real McCoy was. Equally, most authorities agree that there must have been a Mr Lynch who provided the inspiration for the word describing the abrupt termination of life without the inconvenience of a fair trial, and candidates almost without number have been suggested for this dubious honour. Indeed, it can appear that almost anyone named Lynch who had a position of authority anywhere in America between 1780 and 1850 has been mentioned as a candidate at one time or another. In fact no one knows who he was or what he did to earn his morbid immortality. It has even been suggested that Lynch may not be a person at all, but a creek in South Carolina favoured by locals for impromptu executions.

*33
Brown had gained his reputation in the company by designing a stunning concept car called the
Lincoln Futura.
It never went into production, but it did eventually find greater glory – as television’s Batmobile.

*34
In case you have ever wondered, the following are the derivations of the more popular Japanese car names:
Honda,
named for the company’s founder, Soichiro Honda; Isuzu, named for the Isuzu River;
Mitsubishi,
Japanese for ‘three stones,’ which feature on the family crest of the founder;
Nissan,
Japanese for ‘Japan Industry’;
Suzuki,
named for the founder, Suzuki Michio;
Toyota,
named for the founder, Sakicki Toyoda, and not, as many stories have it. because the early models looked like ‘toy autos’.
²¹

*35
In fact like most other people in America. The leading food writer of the age, Duncan Hines, author of the hugely successful
Adventures in Eating,
was himself a cautious eater and declared with pride that he never ate food with French names if he could possibly help it. Hines’s other proud boast was that he did not venture out of America until he was seventy years old, when he made a trip to Europe. He disliked much of what he found there, especially the food.

Bill Bryson turns away form the highways and byways of middle America, so hilariously depicted in his bestselling The Lost Continent, for a fast, exhilarating ride along the Route 66 of American language and popular culture.

In
Made in America
, Bryson de-mythologizes his native land - explaining how a dusty desert hamlet with neither woods nor holly became Hollywood, how the Wild West wasn't won, why Americans say 'lootenant' and 'Toosday', how Americans were eating junk food long before the word itself was cooked up - as well as exposing the true origins of the G-string, the original $64,000 question and Dr Kellogg of cornflakes fame.