Made In America - Bill Bryson [224]
Among the few computer terms that have seeped into general usage are word processor and word processing (both coined in 1970 but not current outside technical journals before 1977), hacker (1975, presumably from the image of one hacking through a thicket of passwords, as with a machete), hardware and software (coined in the mid-1960s, in general usage by the mid-1970s), and computer virus (coined by an American researcher named Fred Cohen in 1984).
Thanks largely to the computer and other new technologies, the English language is growing by up to 20,000 words a year.30 Though most of these new terms are scientific, technical or of othewise specialized application, many hundreds flow into the main body of English each year. The third edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, published in 1992, contained 10,000 words, about 5 per cent of the total, that had not existed twenty years before. The second edition of the Random House unabridged dictionary, published in 1987, underwent an even more extensive change, with 50,000 new words and 210,000 of its 315,000 entries revised or updated. Such is the accumulation of new formations that ‘dictionaries are going to have to come out every six to eight years rather than every ten to keep up with the [new] vocabulary’, an editor of the AHD said in an interview.31
Among the many hundreds of words that have entered English in the last decade or so, one starkly stands out: AIDS. Short for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, it was coined in 1982, but didn’t enter the general consciousness until about 1985. Previously it had been called GRID, for Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, but the name was changed – and, it must be said, the world’s attention perked up – after it was found to be infecting heterosexuals, particularly haemophiliacs. The name for the active agent in AIDS, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, was coined in May 1986 by a committee of virologists after a year in which the virus had gone by two names: LAV and HTLV3.
Before we leave the space age, one small rhetorical curiosity, which oddly failed to attract much attention at the time, needs mentioning. I refer to the utterance of Neil Armstrong when he became the first person to set foot on the moon. As millions of people watched, Armstrong sombrely announced: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ The sentence was reprinted in thousands of headlines the next morning, but in the excitement of his achievement no one seems to have noticed the tautology of it. According to the historian Richard Hanser, Armstrong was astonished and dismayed upon his return to his native planet to find that he had been misquoted everywhere. What he had said was, ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’ The indefinite article had been lost in transmission.32
A more thorny issue is whether, in light of developments of recent years, he should have engaged in such manifestly gender-biased speech. But that is another chapter.
21
American English Today
I
Few issues in America have soaked up more ink and excited more passion in recent years than the debate over education standards. Falling test scores, a perceived decline in literacy, and the frankly abysmal performance of American students compared with those of other nations, have all generated much journalistic hand-wringing.
Troubling indicators of educational failure are not hard to find. In a comparison of proficiency in mathematics among sixth formers from fifteen nations, the United States came twelfth in geometry and calculus and fourteenth in advanced algebra. (Hong Kong came first and Japan second in all three. England and Wales came third or fourth in all three.) In a similar comparison, American thirteen-year-olds did slightly