Made In America - Bill Bryson [207]
As a rule, Siegal explained, ‘we wish not to shock or offend unless there is an overweening reason to risk doing do. We are loath to contribute to a softening of the society’s barriers against harsh or profane language. The issue is nothing so mundane as our welcome among paying customers, be they readers or advertisers. Our management truly believes that civil public discourse is a cherished value of the democracy, and that by our choices we can buttress or undermine that value.’51
One consequence of the American approach to explicit language is that we often have no idea when many of our most common expressions first saw light since they so often go unrecorded. Even something as innocuous as to be caught with one’s pants down isn’t found in print until 1946 (in the Saturday Evening Post), though it is likely that people were using it at least a century earlier.52 More robust expressions like fucking-A and shithead are effectively untraceable.
Swearing, according to one study, accounts for no less than 13 per cent of all adult conversation, yet it remains a neglected area of scholarship. One of the few studies of recent years is Cursing in America, but its author, Timothy Jay of North Adams State College in Massachusetts, had to postpone his research for five years when his dean forbade it. ‘I was told I couldn’t work on this and I couldn’t teach courses on it, and it wouldn’t be a good area for tenure,’ Jay said in a newspaper interview.53 ‘The minute I got tenure I went back to dirty words.’ And quite right, too.
Wing dining, somewhere over France, 1929
19
The Road from Kitty Hawk
The story is a familiar one. On a cold day in December 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright, assisted by five locals, lugged a flimsy-looking aircraft on to the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. As Wilbur steadied the wing, Orville prostrated himself at the controls and set the plane rolling along a wooden track. A few moments later, the plane rose hesitantly, climbed to about 15 feet and puttered along the beach for 120 feet before setting down on a dune. The flight lasted just twelve seconds and covered less ground than the wing-span of a modern jumbo jet, but the airplane age had begun.
Everyone knows that this was one of the great events of modern technology, but there is still a feeling, I think, that the Wrights were essentially a pair of inspired tinkerers who knocked together a simple contraption in their bike shop and were lucky enough to get it airborne. We have all seen film of early aircraft tumbling off the end of piers or being catapulted into haystacks. Clearly the airplane was an invention waiting to happen. The Wrights were just lucky enough to get there first.
In fact, their achievement was much, much greater than that. To master powered flight, it was necessary to engineer a series of fundamental breakthroughs in the design of wings, engines, propellers and control mechanisms. Every piece of the Wrights’ plane was revolutionary, and every piece of it they designed and built themselves.
In just three years of feverish work, these two retiring bachelors from Dayton, Ohio, sons of a bishop of the United Brethren Church, had made themselves the world’s leading authorities on aerodynamics. Their home-built wind tunnel was years ahead of anything existing elsewhere. When they discovered that there was no formal theory of propeller dynamics, no formulae with which to make comparative studies of different propeller types, they devised their own. Because it is all so obvious to us now, we forget just how revolutionary their concept was. No one else was even within years of touching them in their mastery of the aerodynamic properties of wings. Their warping mechanism for controlling the wings was such a breakthrough that it is still ‘used on every fixed-wing aircraft that flies today’.1 As Orville noted years later in an uncharacteristically bold assertion, ‘I believe we possessed more data on cambered surfaces, a hundred times over, than all of our predecessors put