Made In America - Bill Bryson [266]
*3 Founded in 1610, this small colony was abandoned in the 1630s, though it was soon replaced by other British settlements on the island. Because of their isolation, Newfoundlanders created a peculiarly colourful patois blending new coinages and old English dialectal words that now exist nowhere else: diddies for a nightmare, nunny-bag for a kind of knapsack, cocksiddle for a somersault, rushing the waddock for the game of rugby. They continue to employ many odd pronunciations. Chitterlings, for instance, is pronounced ‘chistlings’. The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.
*4 Spain was preyed on not only by sailors from rival nations, but also by mutineer sailors of her own. These latter were called buccaneers because after fleeing their Spanish masters they would sustain themselves by smoking the flesh of wild hogs on a wooden frame called a boucan, until they could capture a becalmed ship and make it their own.
Becoming Americans
*5 And that, incidentally, is all ye ever was – another way of writing the. It was a convenience for scribes and printers, a device that made it easier to justify lines. It was not pronounced ‘yee’.
*6 Why the – s termination rose to prominence is something of a mystery. It came from northern England, a region that had, and still has, many dialectal differences from the more populous south, none other of which has ever had the slightest influence on the speech of London and its environs. Why the inhabitants of southern England suddenly began to show a special regard for the form in the late sixteenth century is unknown.
*7 This ye, it should be noted, is etymologically distinct from the ye used as an alternative for the. As a pronoun ye was used for one person and you for more than one. Gradually this useful distinction fell out of use and you became the invariable form. But we kept the odd practice of associating it with a plural verb, which is why we address a single person with ‘you are’ when logically we ought to say ‘you is’. In fact, until about 1760 ‘you is’ and ‘you was’ were wholly unexceptionable.
*8 Noon is a small oddity. It comes from the Old English word nones, meaning the ninth hour of daylight, or 3 p.m., when prayers were commonly said. It changed to 12 p.m. in the Middle Ages when the time of prayers changed to midday. But in Britain for a time it represented either of the twelfth hours, which explains references in older texts to ‘the noon of midnight’ and the like.
*9 At least the English colonists made some attempt to honour the Indian names. The French and Spanish appeared scarcely to notice what names the tribes used. The French ignored the name Chopunnish, the name used by a tribe of the Pacific northwest, and instead called the people the Nez Percé, ’pierced nose’, for their habit of wearing sea-shells in their nostrils. They performed a similar disservice with Siwash, which is actually just a modified form of the French sauvage, or savage, and with Gros Ventre (French for ‘big belly’). The Spanish, meanwhile, ignored the comely, lilting name Ha-no-o-shatch (’children of the sun’) and called this south-western tribe the Pueblos, ‘people’.
*10 Not all of them made it. In the late seventeenth century one Thomas Benson secured a contract to transport convicts to the southern colonies of America, but quickly realized it was far simpler and more lucrative to dump them on Lundy, just off the north Devon coast. When he was at last caught, he claimed to have fulfilled his contract because he had taken them ‘overseas’. The magistrates were not persuaded and fined him £7,872. The fate of the stranded convicts is unknown.
A ‘Democratic Phrenzy’: America in the Age of Revolution
*11 Among the inaccuracies, Revere didn’t hang the lanterns in the old North Church, because it wasn’t called that until later; at the time of the Revolution it was Christchurch; he made two rides, not one; and he never made it to Concord, as Longfellow has it, but in fact was arrested along