New Facts from Bill Bryson, 1994

I'm currently about halfway through Bill Bryson's Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States. Here are a few facts I didn't know:

• The Mayflower was not mentioned by name in the near-contemporaneous accounts of the Pilgrims' arrival, and "it ended up being made into a barn that still stands...about twenty miles from London..." (page 3). Oh, and they weren't called Pilgrims until the early 18th century when they were mythologized when the U.S. was a young nation.
• Buccaneers are so-called because they subsisted on the dried meat of wild hogs, which was smoked on a wooden frame called a boucan. The word is not related to the word buckaroo, which derives from the Spanish vaquero or cow-handler.
• American rabbits are actually hares. (I may have heard that some time in the past, but it just doesn't stick.)
• The known native languages of California alone had/have "greater linguistic variety than all the known languages of the continent of Europe" (page 22).
• Patrick Henry didn't say any of the famous quotes attributed to him. They were made up by a biographer (who never met him) 17 years after Henry died.
• Nine of 12 Virginia delegates to the Second Continental Congress were related by blood or marriage. Egad.
• The term "truck farm" has nothing to do with trucks. "The goods used in barter were known as truck (from the Old French troquer, meaning to peddle or trade), a sense preserved in the expression to have no truck with" (page 68). The vehicular meaning of truck instead comes from the Latin for wheel, trochus.
• The Patent Office was established in 1790, but the patent board was made up of two-thirds of the president's Cabinet (the secretary of state and secretary of war plus the attorney general, who was not then considered part of the Cabinet). Clearly, they didn't have enough to do in their day jobs.
• Samuel Morse ran for mayor of New York City twice "on a virulently anti-Catholic ticket and believed, among other things, that slavery was not just a good thing but was divinely inspired" (page 90).
• Alexander Graham Bell worked for Western Union when he invented the telephone. He offered it to his employers, but they turned it down because it didn't have any "commercial possibilities" (page 92).
• Prices are often set with amounts like $.49 and $.99 at the end not because it fools people into thinking the price is lower than it is (though it has that side "benefit"). It's because it required cashiers to open the drawer to make change, which meant they couldn't surreptitiously pocket the paper bills.
• Which came first, escalator or escalate? (Would I be asking that question if the answer was anything other than escalator?)
• The whole story I/we think we know about the American West is basically wrong. For instance, cowboys were outnumbered by farmers 1,000 to 1 and "even at their peak there were fewer than ten thousand" of them, "at least a quarter of them black or Mexican" (page 128). Frederic Remington basically made up the concept we have in our heads, and he never even went to the West during that time. Terms like bounty hunter and gunslinger were made up by Hollywood.
• The term strike (as in organized labor) comes from sailors striking the sails on ships to protest their working conditions.
• "Until well into the 19th century, it was as cheap to send a ton of goods across the Atlantic as it was to move it 30 miles overland" in the United States (page 158).

One final quote stood out to me from the chapter on the American "melting pot." Remember, this book was published in 1994:

If one attitude can be said to characterize America's regard for immigration over the past two hundred years, it is the belief that while immigration was unquestionably a wise and prescient thing in the case of one's own parents or grandparents, it really ought to stop now" (pages 145-146).