“A literate exploration of why we use—or mangle—our native tongue.”—USA Today Bill Bryson celebrates America’s magnificent offspring in the book that reveals once and for all how a dusty western hamlet with neither woods nor holly came to be known as Hollywood…and exactly why Mr. Yankee Doodle call his befeathered cap “Macaroni.” Readers from Toad Suck, Arkansas, to Idiotsville, Oregon--and everywhere in between--will love Made in America , Bill Bryson's Informal History of the English Language in the United States. It is, in a word, fascinating. After reading this tour de force, it's clear that a nation's language speaks volumes about its true character: you are what you speak. Bryson traces America's history through the language of the time, then goes on to discuss words culled from everyday activities: immigration, eating, shopping, advertising, going to the movies, and others. Made in America will supply you with interesting facts and cocktail chatter for a year or more. Did you know, for example, that Teddy Roosevelt's "speak softly and carry a big stick" credo has its roots in a West African proverb? Or that actor Walter Matthau's given name is Walter Mattaschanskayasky? Or that the supposedly frigid Puritans--who called themselves "Saints," by the way--had something called a pre-contract, which was a license for premarital sex? Made in America is an excellent discussion of American English, but what makes the book such a treasure is that it offers much, much more. “Delightful…relentlessly, exuberantly informative…a potted history of the United States, presenting aspects of American life from cooking to swearing, from warring to shopping.” - Washington Post Book World “From slavery, immigration and Westward expansion to advertising, sex and shopping malls, he provides scads of fascinating, often little-known facts and anecdotes that, far from glutting his reader’s appetites, should leave them hungry for more.” - Wall Street Journal “A terrific book, likely to make its readers chuckle if not guffaw…If more high schools used thisas their history text, the course might be one of the morepopular ones in school.” - Denver Post Bill Bryson, bestselling author of The Mother Tongue , now celebrates its magnificent offspring in the book that reveals once and for all how a dusty western hamlet with neither woods nor holly came to be known as Hollywood . . . and exactly why Mr. Yankee Doodle called his befeathered cap "Macaroni." Bill Bryson's bestselling books include One Summer , A Short History of Nearly Everything , At Home , A Walk in the Woods , Neither Here nor There , Made in America , and The Mother Tongue . He lives in England with his wife. The Mayflower and Before The image of the spiritual founding of America that generations of Americans have grown up with was created, oddly enough, by a poet of limited talents (to put it in the most magnanimous possible way) who lived two centuries after the event in a country three thousand miles away. Her name was Felicia Dorothea Hemans and she was not American but Welsh. Indeed, she had never been to America and appears to have known next to nothing about the country. It just happened that one day in 1826 her local grocer in Rhyllon, Wales, wrapped her purchases in a sheet of two-year-old newspaper from Boston, and her eye was caught by a small article about a founders' day celebration in Plymouth. It was very probably the first she had heard of the Mayflower or the Pilgrims. But inspired as only a mediocre poet can be, she dashed off a poem, "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers (in New England)," which begins The breaking waves dashed high On a stern and rock-bound coast And the woods, against a stormy sky, Tneir giant branches toss'd And the heavy night hung dark The hills and water o'er, Men a band of exiles moor'd their bark On the wild New England shore and carries on in a vigorously grandiloquent, indeterminately rhyming vein for a further eight stanzas. Although the poem was replete with errors--the Mayflower was not a bark, it was not night when they moored, Plymouth was not "where first they trod" but in fact marked their fourth visit ashore--it became an instant classic, and formed the essential image of the Mayflower landing that most Americans carry with them to this day.* The one thing the Pilgrims certainly didn't do was step ashore on Plymouth Rock. Quite apart from the consideration that it may have stood well above the high-water mark in 1620, no prudent mariner would try to bring a ship alongside a boulder in a heaving December sea when a sheltered inlet beckoned nearby. If the Pilgrims even noticed Plymouth Rock, there is no sign of it. No mention of the rock is found among any of the surviving documents and letters of the age, and indeed it doesn't make its first recorded appearance until 1715, almost a century later.1 Not until about the time Ms. Hemans wrote her swooping epic did Plymouth Rock become indelibly ass