Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States

1310 Pages·2016·3.07 MB·English

by  Bryson B.

Dedication
To David, Felicity, Catherine, and Sam
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
1. The Mayflower and Before
2. Becoming Americans
3. A “Democratical Phrenzy”: America in the
Age of Revolution
4. Making a Nation
5. By the Dawn’s Early Light: Forging a
National Identity
6. We’re in the Money: The Age of Invention
7. Names
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
13. Manners and Other Matters
14. The Hard Sell: Advertising in America
15. The Movies
16. The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play
17. Of Bombs and Bunkum: Politics and War
18. Sex and Other Distractions
19. From Kitty Hawk to the Jumbo Jet
20. Welcome to the Space Age: The 1950s and
Beyond
21. American English Today
Select Bibliography
Notes on Sources
Index
About the Author
Praise for Made in America
Books by Bill Bryson
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
In the 1940s, a British traveler 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 Iona
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, when 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 into 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
but 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 treasured incantations.
Because of this, they are sometimes 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, that
may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is a rare surviving
link with the very distant past. It not only gives us a
fragmentary image of how children were being
amused at the time 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 in about 1400 the
expression vanished from the written record. For
four hundred years there was no sign of it. Then,
suddenly and unexpectedly, it resurfaced in
America in 1857 as neither hide nor hair. So what
exactly happened to this useful expression during
those four long centuries, and what prompted its
abrupt return to prominence in the sixth decade of