| Product: |
Made in America - Bill Bryson |
| Date: |
18/02/04 (118 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Fascinating, Endless trivia, Funny and entertaining
Disadvantages: If you keep reading facts out to people they might hit you to shut you up...
Bill Bryson has an amazing talent ? he can write about the most boring, dry and deadly dull topic yet make it seem fascinating. Although he is most well known for his travel books such as Notes From A Small Island and Neither Here Nor There, he has also written several books on other subjects. One is the recent A Short History Of Nearly Everything, a very accessible book covering just about all of science, and another is the earlier Mother Tongue, a book on the English language. This review is on Made In America, which is a successor to Mother Tongue, but there is no need to read them in order, this can stand alone.
Made In America is about that much maligned variant of English, American-English. This is not presented in a boring text-book form, but instead the context in which the language developed is included, along with many interesting and obscure snippets of trivia. These are the kinds of things that you just have to tell someone, such as the fact that there is a place called Cheesequake, New Jersey, that slot machines were first invented as chewing gum dispensers, and that the term computer bug was invented after an actual bug was trapped between two connectors and stopped an early computer working.
The book progresses in a roughly chronological fashion, starting out with the Mayflower and the Saints, as the Pilgrims called themselves, heading for the New World. They took the form of English that was spoken at the time along with them, and some of this older English remains today while our own language has moved on. For example ?Fall? as a term for Autumn evolved in England before the Pilgrims left and they took it with them. It died out in the nineteenth centaury in England, but remains as an American term today. T
he same is true for trash, attic, molasses and many other words.
We then move through the establishment of an American nation, via the flag once having 18 stripes and the Oyster War. You then reache immigration and ?The Melting-Pot?, a term which comes from a play written by the British Israel Zangwill in 1908. You learn something new on every page! Now the effect that immigration had on America?s language is examined ? you would be surprised to learn some of the words that originate from foreign languages brought by immigrants. Yankee and boss come from Dutch, smithereens from Gaelic, cranky from German. As well as language, the effect that immigration had on society is also included in these chapters. It seems that racism and the clashing of cultures is not limited to recent times.
After this the book moves onto the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are chapters on travel, food, advertising, shopping, movies and sport. These all examine how American popular culture developed, and how these developments affected the language along the way. For example the food chapter details the emergence of the first hamburger, the start of fast food and explains some lunch counter lingo. Most people probably know BLT, which was first used in these establishments, is bacon, lettuce and tomato. But did you know that ?Noahs?s Boy? is a slice of ham, and ?dough well done with cow to cover? is toast with butter? Well you do now!
Via politics and war, which includes an explanation for why tanks are called tanks and what Gestapo is short for, we then get onto the more risqué ?Sex and Other Distractions? chapter. Yes you learn that pornography comes from the Greek for ?harlot writing? and that most US states still have laws against fornication, plus quite a bit more that &#
73; can?t really include here! Then we are brought up to date with developments in the last fifty years, and end with some predictions for what American-English may do in the future. Will America need laws to establish English as the national language? Will American-English and English become two different languages? Will political correctness demand manholes be renamed sewer holes? That would just be taking things a bit far!
This is just such a fascinating and intriguing book. Every page has something new and another piece of random trivia that may come in handy someday. You can annoy yet intrigue the people around you for hours by reading particularly amazing things out to them, such as explaining how there was once a chocolate bar called a ?Vegetable Sandwich? which consisted of chocolate covered vegetables and was sold with the assurance that ?it will not constipate?. You don?t learn things like that from most books. It is written in a very easy to read way, and you can either read the whole thing in one go or just dip into areas that interest you now and then. It is great for long train journeys I find, except I always have the urge to tell complete strangers sitting opposite me an interesting fact that I?ve just read? If you like Bill Bryson?s other books, are interested in American culture, the English language, history, trivia or just want a light yet informative book then this is for you!
Made In America is £7.99 on amazon.co.uk
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