Made In America - Bill Bryson [189]
If you have ever wondered why Yankee Doodle called the feather in his cap macaroni, the answer is that macaroni was a slang term of the day for a fop. The feather in his cap possibly alluded to the habit of colonial soldiers, who often had no uniforms, of sticking a feather of piece of paper in their caps as a means of distinguishing themselves during battle.
The War of 1812 gave us, again as we have already seen, the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and Uncle Sam, plus conscript as both a noun and a verb and two catch-phrases of some durability: ‘Don’t give up the ship’ and ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours.’ The first belongs to Captain James Lawrence and the second to Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry.
Not until we get to the Civil war period do we at last begin to encounter strictly military terms that have passed into wider usage. Among the Civil War neologisms that are still with us are KP (for kitchen police), AWOL (absent without leave), pup-tents (originally known as dog-tents), and, rather surprisingly, doughboy and grapevine in the context of rumours. Doughboy appears to have been first applied to Union soldiers during the 1860s. (The earliest reference is found in the memoirs of George Armstrong Custer in 1867, but the context indicates that it was already widely known.) The origins are entirely mysterious. Since early colonial times small fried cakes had been known as doughboys, and the word may betoken a similarity in appearance between these cakes and the buttons on cavalry soldiers’ uniforms, but it is no more than a guess. At all events, the term faded from sight after about 1870 and didn’t catch on again until World War I.19 Grapevine, or grapevine telegraph, as a notional medium for the transformation of rumours, is equally mysterious. It was widely used during the Civil War, usually with the sense of a wholly unreliable rumour, but what precisely inspired it is unknown.
We have been conditioned by Hollywood to think of Union soldiers dressed identically in blue and Confederate troops in grey. In fact, for the first year or so of the war most soldiers wore the uniforms of their state militias, which came in any number of colours. Troops from Iowa and Wisconsin, for instance, wore grey uniforms that were very like the official Confederate outfits, leading to endless confusion on the battlefield. After the North lost the first battle of Bull Run because Union troops failed to fire on an advancing contingent of Virginia militia, mistaking them for northern allies, the War Department rushed into production hundreds of thousands of standard uniforms. These were manufactured with an old process employing recycled woollen fibres and known as shoddy. Because the uniforms were poorly made and easily came unstitched, shoddy came to denote any article of inferior quality. The system of producing uniforms en masse also led, incidentally, to the introduction of standard graduated sizes, a process that was carried over to civilian life after the war.20
One myth of the Civil War period is that hooker for a prostitute arose from the camp followers of General Joseph Hooker. It is true that the cadres of sexual entrepreneurs who followed Hooker’s men from battlefield to battlefield were jocularly known as Hooker’s Division or Hooker’s Reserves, but hooker itself predates the Civil War. It was first noted in 1845 in reference to a section of New York, Corlear’s Hook, also known as The Hook, where prostitutes congregated.21
One term that did spring to prominence during the Civil War, though again of greater antiquity, was the Mason-Dixon line. It had been laid out a century earlier by the English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who were brought to America in 1763 to resolve a long-standing border dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland. Though we tend to think of the Mason-Dixon line as a straight east-west demarcation, a good quarter of it ran north-south. It was only coincidentally that it delineated the boundary between slave and non-slave states. Had it not been for this, the line would very probably have been