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Book: Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States
Quotes of Book: Made in America: An Informal
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  1. Bill Bryson _ Made in America: An Informal

    Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon {a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers}, jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s.
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  2. Bill Bryson _ Made in America: An Informal

    By the 1920s if you wanted to work behind a lunch counter you needed to know that 'Noah's boy' was a slice of ham {since Ham was one of Noah's sons} and that 'burn one' or 'grease spot' designated a hamburger. 'He'll take a chance' or 'clean the kitchen' meant an order of hash, 'Adam and Eve on a raft' was two poached eggs on toast, 'cats' eyes' was tapioca pudding, 'bird seed' was cereal, 'whistleberries' were baked beans, and 'dough well done with cow to cover' was the somewhat labored way of calling for an order of toast and butter. Food that had been waiting too long was said to be 'growing a beard'. Many of these shorthand terms have since entered the mainstream, notably BLT for a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, 'over easy' and 'sunny side up' in respect of eggs, and 'hold' as in 'hold the mayo'.
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  3. Bill Bryson _ Made in America: An Informal

    It took Read some twenty years of searching to nail the matter down, but thanks to his efforts we now know that OK first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839, as a jocular abbreviation for 'Oll Korrect'. At
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  4. Bill Bryson _ Made in America: An Informal

    The inhabitants of England in the age of Chaucer commonly used an expression, to be in hide and hair, meaning to be lost or beyond discovery. But then it disappears from the written record for four hundred years before resurfacing, suddenly and unexpectedly, in America in 1857 as neither hide nor hair. It is dearly unlikely that the phrase went into a linguistic coma for four centuries. So who was quietly preserving it for four hundred years, and why did it so abruptly return to prominence in the sixth decade of the nineteenth century in a country two thousand miles away?
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