Made In America - Bill Bryson [174]
According to Dillard, ace, deuce and trey, for one, two and three, are also American, through the influence of French gamblers of New Orleans. He may be right in the case of trey, but the first two were in common use in Britain in the Middle Ages and may date from Norman times. Ace comes ultimately from the Latin ās, a basic unit of currency, and deuce from the Latin duōs, or ‘two’. The French gamblers of New Orleans did, however, give us another venerable gambling term: to shoot craps. In New Orleans the game the English called hazard became known as crabs, which mutated over time into craps. It has no etymological connection to the slang term for faeces. The French were also ultimately responsible for keno (from quine, ‘a set of five’), an early form of bingo that was once very popular, though it left no linguistic legacy beyond its name.
More productive in terms of its linguistic impact was a much later introduction to America, bridge, which arrived from Russia and the Middle East in the early 1890s. The word is unrelated to the type of bridge that spans a river. It comes from the Russian birich, the title of a town crier. Among the expressions that have passed from the bridge table to the world at large are bid, to follow suit, in spades, long suit and renege.16
At about the time that bridge was establishing itself in America, a native-born gaming device was born: the slot machine. Slot machines of various types were produced in America as early as the 1890s, but they didn’t come into their own until 1910 when an enterprising firm called the Mills Novelty Company introduced a vending machine for chewing-gum, which dispensed gum in accordance with flavours depicted on three randomly spinning wheels. The flavours were cherry, orange, and plum – symbols that are used on slot machines to this day. Each wheel also contained a bar reading ‘1910 Fruit Gum’, three of which in a row led to a particularly lavish payout, just as it does today. Also just as today a lemon in any row meant no payout at all – and from this comes lemon in the sense of something that is disappointing or inadequate. The potential of slot machines for higher stakes than pieces of chewing-gum wasn’t lost on the manufacturers and soon, converted to monetary payouts, they were appearing everywhere that gambling was legal, though no one thought to call them one-armed bandits until the 1950s.17
Partly in response to the popularity of gambling, a pious young New Englander named Anne Abbott invented a wholesome alternative in 1843: the board game. Board games like chess and checkers had of course been around for centuries and in almost all cultures, but never before had anyone devised a competitive entertainment in which players followed a path through a representation of the real world. Abbott intended the game not just as an amusement, but as an aid to upright living. Called The Mansion of Happiness, it required competitors to travel the board in pursuit of Eternal Salvation, avoiding such pitfalls along the way as Perjury, Robbery, Immodesty, Ingratitude and Drunkenness. The idea of moving a playing piece along a route beset with hazards was hugely novel in 1843, and not only made Abbott a tidy sum but also inspired a flock of imitators.
One was a young man named Milton Bradley, who produced his first hit, The Checkered Game of Life, in 1860. Also morally uplifting, it was clearly inspired by, if not actually modelled on, Abbot’s elevating divertissement. Bradley’s most original stroke, however, came when he devised a way of packing eight separate games, among them checkers, chess, backgammon and dominoes, into a small, easily portable box, which proved a hit with soldiers during the Civil War.
Rather more innovative was George Swinton Parker, founder of the second great name of the American games industry, Parker Brothers. Born into a venerable but declining family in Salem, Massachusetts, Parker loved the idea of board games, but hankered for a reward more immediately gratifying than future salvation.