Made in America
Bill Bryson · 1994 · 9 ideas · 9 min
American English and American identity were shaped together by immigration, invention, and marketing, and many of the country's proudest founding myths turn out to be later inventions themselves.
Why this book
Bryson's loose but consistent argument is that American English isn't a degraded offshoot of British English but its own vigorous, constantly mutating creation, forged by successive waves of immigrants, frontier improvisation, and above all consumer capitalism's endless need for new words to sell new things. He traces this through the earliest colonial settlers borrowing words from Indigenous languages, through the linguistic contributions of enslaved Africans and later immigrant groups, up through the twentieth-century explosion of vocabulary generated by advertising, Hollywood, and the automobile.
Along the way, the book matters as much for its running debunking project as for its linguistics: Bryson repeatedly shows that celebrated national myths — Patrick Henry's famous defiant speech, Ray Kroc single-handedly inventing McDonald's, the noble self-sufficiency of frontier pioneers — are frequently later embellishments or outright fabrications, suggesting that American identity, like American English, was built as much through storytelling and salesmanship as through the events themselves.
Who should read it
Casual readers who enjoy trivia-rich, anecdote-driven nonfiction and want an entertaining tour through the origins of everyday words and cultural myths will enjoy this most; it particularly suits fans of Bryson's other popular history and travel writing. Readers seeking a rigorous academic linguistics text should note that some details and etymologies here have been challenged or corrected by scholars since publication.
About the author
Bill Bryson is an American-British author known for accessible, humorous nonfiction spanning travel, science, and language, including A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Mother Tongue; he has lived extensively in both the United States and the United Kingdom.