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Book: Made in America
Quotes of Book: Made in America

Bill Bryson _ Made in America
That is why, for instance, horses in New England {as in East Anglia} neigh, while those in the middle states of America {and the Midlands of England} whinny.
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Bill Bryson _ Made in America
Baseball remains one of the most fertile grounds for inventive wordplay in American life. Among the more notable-and on the face of it more bewildering-recent neologisms are to dial 8 for a home run and Linda Ronstadt for a good fastball. Dial 8 comes from the practice among hotels of requiring customers to dial 8 for a long-distance line. Linda Ronstadt, more complicatedly, is an allusion to her song "Blue Bayou," the significance of which becomes less puzzling when you reflect that a good fastball "blew by you." Baseball terms presumed to be new often are not.
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Bill Bryson _ Made in America
E Pluribus Unum, "One from Many," was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.}
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Bill Bryson _ Made in America
As early colonists employed odd spellings, so too they often brought unexpected pronunciations with them. This was particularly the case in Virginia, where the leading families had a special fondness for pronouncing their family names in improbable ways, so that Sclater became "Slaughter," Munford became "Mumfud," Randolph was "Randall," Wyatt was "Wait," Devereaux was "Deverecks," Callowhill was "Carroll," Higginson was "Hickerson," Norsworthy was "Nazary," and Taliaferro became a somewhat less than self-evident "Tolliver.
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Bill Bryson _ Made in America
If you have ever wondered why radio and television stations always have call signs beginning with W or K, the answer is that those letters were assigned to American airwaves by an international convention held in London in 1912. The United States was given the call letters A, N, W, and K. A and N were reserved respectively for the army and navy. The other two were given to public broadcasters.
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Bill Bryson _ Made in America
if we wished to find a modern-day model for British and American speech of the late eighteenth century, we could probably do no better than Yosemite Sam.
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Bill Bryson _ Made in America
Once there were many more in like vein-e.g., tuifu {"the ultimate in fuckups}, tarfu {"things are really fucked up"}, fubar {"fucked up beyond all recognition"}, and fubid {"fuck you, buddy, I'm detached"}.
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Bill Bryson _ Made in America
camouflage {rather oddly from camouflet, meaning "to blow smoke up someone's nose," a pastime that appears on the linguistic evidence to be specific to the French},
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Bill Bryson _ Made in America
Columbus never found Antilla or anything else he was looking for. His epochal voyage of 1492 was almost the last thing-indeed almost the only thing-that went right in his life. Within eight years, he would find himself summarily relieved of his post as Admiral of the Ocean Sea, returned to Spain in chains, and allowed to sink into such profound obscurity that we don't know for sure where he is buried. To achieve such a precipitous fall in less than a decade required an unusual measure of incompetence and arrogance. Columbus had both.
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Bill Bryson _ Made in America
the Pilgrims didn't have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English-Samoset only a little, but Squanto with total assurance {and some Spanish into the bargain}.
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Bill Bryson _ Made in America
{For much the same reason, early owners discovered that if they charged odd amounts like 49 cents or 99 cents the cashier would very probably have to open the drawer to extract a penny change, obviating the possibility of the dreaded unrecorded transaction. Only later did it dawn on merchants that $1.99 had the odd subliminal quality of seeming markedly cheaper than $2.}
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Bill Bryson _ Made in America
Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it. They wouldn't arrive in America for another decade,
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