Made In America - Bill Bryson [267]
*12 It is, of course, no more than a tendency. Many Americans rhyme grovel with novel, and all of them say mercantile, infantile and servile in contradiction of the usual pattern.
*13 Among the words he lower-cased were nature, creator and even God. Most were later capitalized by the printer.38
*14 Though John Hancock became immediately famous for his cockily outsize signature on the Declaration, the expression ‘Put your John Hancock here’ for a signature didn’t apparently occur to anyone until 1903.40
Making a Nation
*15 ‘Peaceably to assemble’ is an interesting and early example of the ginger avoidance of a split infinitive. The curious conviction that infinitives should not be split had only recently come into fashion.
*16 Here, for instance, is Kingsley Amis: ‘An early Congress of the United States debated what language the new nation was to speak. English symbolized the vanquished colonial oppressor, its sole virtue being that everyone used it. As so many of us know, it won the contest, narrowly beating German. There were also votes – not many – for Ancient Greek, as the language of the first democracy, and for a Red Indian language, perhaps Massachusetts or Cree, because it was American.’ (The Amis Collection, p. 17.)
*17 It was renamed the Smithsonian in honour of a shadowy Englishman named James Smithson. The bastard son of a Duke of Northumberland, Smithson had never been to America and had no known American friends or connections, but he agreed to leave his considerable fortune of £100,000 to the government of the United States if it would name an institution of learning after him.33
We’re in the Money: The Age of Invention
*18 It is a myth, incidentally, that SOS stands for save our ship or save our souls. It stands for nothing. It was chosen as a distress signal at an international conference in 1906 not because it had any meaning but because its nine keystrokes (three dots, three dashes, three dots) were simple to transmit.24
*19 Though Westinghouse is associated in the popular mind with electricity, his initial fame came from the invention of air-brakes for trains. Before this useful development trains could only stop in one of two ways: by having brakemen manually turn a hand-wheel on each car, a laborious process, or by crashing into something solid, like another train.
*20 Curiously, although everyone refers to the object as a light bulb, few dictionaries do. The American Heritage (first edition) has lighthouse, light-headed, light meter and many others in similar vein, but no light bulb. If you wish to know what that object is, you must look under incandescent light, electric light or electric lamp. Funk & Wagnalls Revised Standard Dictionary devotes 6,500 words to light and its derivatives, but again makes no mention of light bulb. Webster’s Second New International similarly makes no mention of light bulb. The third edition does although it has just this to say: ‘light bulb n: incandescent lamp’. For full details you still have to turn to incandescent lamp. In my experience, most dictionaries are the same. I can’t explain it.
Names
*21 Nearly all the spellings suggest, incidentally, that the modem American pronunciation of his name, ‘rawly’, is more faithful to the original than the modern British pronunciation, ‘rally’.
The Melting-Pot: Immigration in America
*22 It should be pointed out, however, that the closeness of German, Dutch and Yiddish often makes it impossible to ascribe a term positively to one camp. Spook and dumb could be either Dutch or German in origin, and nosh, schlemiel and phooey, among others, are as likely to have entered American English from German sources as Yiddish. More often than not, the influence most