Go Read This: Bill Bryson's "Made In America"
My favorite writer of all time is a man named BIll Bryson. His two most popular books, at least among people I know, are “A Walk in the Woods” and, “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” I’ve only read one Bryson book I disliked - I found “The Lost Continent” extremely, and uncharacteristically, negative - and I thought I had exhausted the catalog when I finished his latest, “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” shortly after it was released. But then Amazon randomly suggested a Bryson work called, “Made in America,” to me during one of my late-night drunken e-shopping sprees. I had never seen this book being sold anywhere and my mother, the biggest Bryson fan of all, hadn’t even heard of it. Being a completionist, I bought it. And, damn, I’m glad I did.
This book is not only one of my favorite Bryson works but one of the best books I’ve read overall. The official premise of the book is an examination of the American language: where our words and phrases come from, how and why we evolved the language that we did. It sounds pretty boring, right? But Bryson could, and did, make a book about molecules and atoms engaging, so it must have been child’s play to make an interesting book about language.
Instead of writing a book about word origins, Bryson packs the title - packs it - with interesting facts and stories, not all directly word-related, but ultimately leading back to the explanation of some term, colloquialism or word. I learned that the Puritans encouraged pre-marital sex, that ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ has a forgotten verse, that Thomas Edison was in favor of answering the phone with a rousing “Ahoy!”, and that Chevrolet is named for a Swiss mechanic, Louis Chevrolet, who worked for Billy Durant, the founder of General Motors, and was fired for smoking a cigarette (his name was still used for the cars, though). Every page of this book has some sort of interesting little story that explains some mystery of our culture and I couldn’t have enjoyed it more.
So, if you’re a knowledge junkie and you haven’t taken the time to sink your teeth into a good title, may I suggest this never-mentioned Bill Bryson work? Why it is never mentioned is beyond me. I imagine that it’s owned by a different publisher than Bryson works with now and they’re not excited to push another company’s product but one can’t be sure. What I do know for sure, thanks to this book, is that World War II gave us the use of “fuck” in the sense of things being in bad shape - “That’s fucked up,” “We’re fucked,” etc. Thanks, Grandpa! I’d be fucked without it.