by Bill Bryson
Edsel had the most expensive advertising promotion of any product up to that time, but the company could hardly give the cars away.18 Two years, two months, $450 million and 110,847 Edsels later, Ford pulled the plug, and the Edsel became part of history.
But the automobile as a component of American life went from strength to strength. By 1963 one-sixth of all American businesses were directly connected with the car in one way or another.19 The production of cars consumed 20 per cent of American steel, 30 per cent of glass and over 60 per cent of the nation’s rubber.20 By the 1970s, 94.7 per cent of American commuters travelled to work by car. About half had no access to any form of public transportation. They had to drive to work whether they wanted to or not. Most in fact wanted to. Today the car has become such an integral part of American life that the maximum distance the average American is prepared to walk without getting into a car is just six hundred feet.
Despite the nation’s attachment to the car, relatively few motoring terms have entered the general lexicon in the postwar years. Among the few: gridlock, coined in 1971 but not in general usage until about 1980; fast lane in a metaphorical sense (’life in the fast lane’) in 1978; drive-by shooting in 1985; and jump start in a metaphorical sense (’jump start the economy’) as recently as 1988. And that is about it.
What increasingly changed were the types of cars Americans drove. Until the early 1970s, with the exception of the Volkswagen Beetle and a few incidental European sports cars, American cars were overwhelmingly American. (In 1954, for instance, of the 7.2 million new cars sold in America, only 50,000, well under 1 per cent, were imports.) But then things changed as Japanese manufacturers entered the market. Made in Japan, which in the 1950s had been a joke term synonymous with shoddiness, took on an ominous sense of reliability and efficiency. Japanese car makers that few Americans had heard of in 1970 were by 1975 household names. *34
American car makers, so invincible only a decade before, suddenly seemed worryingly inept. They continued churning out heavy, often unreliable, gas-guzzlers (an Americanism of 1969) in overstaffed factories that were massively uncompetitive compared with the lean production techniques of the Japanese. By 1992 the American car industry was losing $700 million a month. Even those who patriotically tried to buy American (an expression that gained widespread currency in the late 1970s) often couldn’t. Of the $20,000 purchase price of a Pontiac Le Mans in 1991, $6,000 went to South Korea, $3,500 to Japan, and between $100 and $1,500 each to suppliers in Germany, Taiwan, Singapore, Britain, Ireland and Barbados.22 By 1988 imports, primarily of cars but also of cameras, televisions, radios and much else in which America had once been self-sufficient, accounted for over 13 per cent of America’s gross national product, and the country’s annual trade balance had grown to $150 billion – about $600 for every man, woman and child in the country.
By 1990 America’s sense of declining economic prowess generated a volume of disquiet that sometimes verged on the irrational. When a professor of economics at Yale polled his students as to which they would prefer, a situation in which America had 1 per cent economic growth while Japan experienced 1.5 per cent growth, or one in which America suffered a 1 per cent downturn but Japan’s fell by 1.5 per cent, the majority voted for the latter. They preferred America to be poorer if Japan were poorer still, rather than a situation in which both became more prosperous.
Years before America suffered the indignity of watching its industrial advantage eroded, it experienced a no less alarming blow to its technological prestige. On 26 August 1957 the nation was shaken to the core to learn that the Soviet Union had successfully launched a satellite called Sputnik (meaning ‘fellow earth traveller’). Never mind that Sputnik was only about the size of a beach ball and that it couldn’t do anything except reflect light. It was the first earthbound object hurled into space. Editorial writers, in a frenzy of anxiety, searched for a scapegoat and mostly blamed the education system (a plaint that would be continually refined and applied to other perceived national failings ever after). Four months later America rushed to meet the challenge with the launch of its own Vanguard satellite.23 Unfortunately the satellite rose only a few feet off the launchpad, tipped over and burst into flames. It became known, almost inevitably, as the Kaputnik. A little over three years later, America suffered further humiliation when the Soviets launched a spaceship, Vostok, bearing the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, which made a single orbit of Earth and returned safely. A week later, Cuban exiles, with American backing, launched the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and were routed. Never had America’s stock sunk so low in the world.
The country’s response was not entirely unlike that of the Yale economics students mentioned above. Without any idea of what the payback might be other than in glory, the country embarked on the most expensive scientific enterprise ever undertaken on the planet with the single ultimate goal of landing a man on the moon before the Soviet Union did. On 20 July 1969 the goal was achieved when Neil Armstrong stepped from his Apollo 11 spacecraft and became the first person to walk on the moon. America was back on top.
The heady first decade of the space programme created, or significantly rejuvenated, a clutch of words, among them reentry, lift-off, blast-off, mission control, A-OK, thrust, launchpad, orbit, gantry, glitch (first recorded outside a Yiddish context when spoken by John Glenn in 1966), and astronaut. What is perhaps most interesting is how many space terms predate the space age, thanks for the most part to the world’s abiding love for science fiction. Among the words that took flight long before any space traveller did we find astronaut (1880), space ship (1894), space suit (1924), rocket ship (1928), star ship (1934), space station (1936), blast-off (1937) and spaceman (1942).24
The space race did have many technological spinoffs, not least in the development of communications satellites and even more particularly in the advance of computing. So universal have computers become in offices, banks, stores and homes that it is easy to forget just what a recent development they are. Though the word was coined in 1872, for a type of adding machine, as late as 1956 there were no more than two dozen computers in the nation. In the following two decades their numbers multiplied vastly, but even in 1976, the year Apple Computer was founded, there were still perhaps no more than 50,000 computers in the world. A decade later, that many were being built every day.25
One of the first popular investigations into computers appeared in March 1961 when Life magazine ran an article, ‘The Machines Are Taking Over’, about the new phenomenon. In a tone of chirpy awe, the author noted how a room-sized ‘robot’ (a word he used throughout the story) had transformed the efficiency of the Braun Brothers sausage factory in Troy, Ohio. When fed a stack of punch cards telling it what cuts of meat were available, this device ‘hummed softly, its lights flickered, and it riffled the deck of cards over and over again’. After just thirty-six minutes of technological pondering, it spewed out the optimum recipe for making bologna: ‘24 pounds of cow meat, 24 of beef, 103 of beef cheeks, 150 of beef plate, 30 of neck bone meat, 24 of picnics, 65 of neck trimmings, 10 of trim conversion, 20 of rework from previous batches’. That was all it did. It couldn’t handle accounts or billing, or monitor the company’s heating and electricity. Thirty-six minutes of intense thinking about beef cheek and neck trimmings, and it retired exhausted till the next day.
It doesn’t seem a terribly impressive performance now, but just five years earlier, Braun Brothers would have needed several million dollars and a separate building to house the computer power necessary to calculate the best use of beef plate, trim conversion and the other delectable constituents of a well-made bologna. At just $50,000, the Braun Brothers computer was a snip.
The same article went on to note how a computer in Glendale, California, was programmed with the 500 words most frequently used by Beatnik poets and told to create its own poems. Typical of the genre was ‘Auto-Beatnik Poem No.41: Insects’, which included these lines:
All children are small and cr
usty
And all pale, blind, humble waters are cleaning,
A insect, dumb and torrid, comes of the daddyo
How is a insect into this fur?
The reporter noted that when several of these poems were read to an unsuspecting audience at a Los Angeles coffeehouse, many listeners ‘became quite stirred up with admiration’.26
Though the computer is a comparatively recent entrant into daily life, some of the terminology associated with it goes back half a century or so. Computer bugs dates from the 1940s. There is, it appears, a literal explanation behind the term. In 1945 a huge US Navy computer broke down. Its operators searched in mystification for a cause until they found a moth crushed between the contact points of an electrical relay switch. After that whenever a computer was down, it was said to need debugging.27 Bit (a contraction of binary digit) was coined at about the same time, though its offspring, byte (eight bits for the technically unaware), dates only from 1964, and was apparently chosen arbitrarily.28 Equally arbitrary is the Winchester disk drive (first recorded in print in 1973). It doesn’t commemorate any person or place, but was simply the code-name under which IBM developed the technology.
Computers have spawned many technical languages – Assembler, Pascal, C, C++, OLE, Lisp, Ada, Fortran, Cobol, Algol, Oberon, and others almost without number – and these in turn have generated a huge vocabulary. But for the lay-person searching for linguistic excitement the computer world is pretty much a dead planet. Though computer terminology runs to many thousands of words, the great bulk coined in the past twenty years, probably more than half are merely elaborations on already existing words (port, format, file, copy, array), and those that are original to the field are almost always dully and self-evidently descriptive of their function (microprocessor, random access memory, disk driver, database). A slight exception is the operating system known as DOS. It originated as Q-DOS (a play on kudos), and stood, rather daringly, for Quick and Dirty Operating System. When Microsoft bought the firm in 1981, it changed the name to the more staid MS-DOS, for Microsoft Disk Operating System.29 That is about as lively a computer story as you will find.
Among the few computer terms that have seeped into general usage are word processor and word processing (both coined in 1970 but not current outside technical journals before 1977), hacker (1975, presumably from the image of one hacking through a thicket of passwords, as with a machete), hardware and software (coined in the mid-1960s, in general usage by the mid-1970s), and computer virus (coined by an American researcher named Fred Cohen in 1984).
Thanks largely to the computer and other new technologies, the English language is growing by up to 20,000 words a year.30 Though most of these new terms are scientific, technical or of othewise specialized application, many hundreds flow into the main body of English each year. The third edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, published in 1992, contained 10,000 words, about 5 per cent of the total, that had not existed twenty years before. The second edition of the Random House unabridged dictionary, published in 1987, underwent an even more extensive change, with 50,000 new words and 210,000 of its 315,000 entries revised or updated. Such is the accumulation of new formations that ‘dictionaries are going to have to come out every six to eight years rather than every ten to keep up with the [new] vocabulary’, an editor of the AHD said in an interview.31
Among the many hundreds of words that have entered English in the last decade or so, one starkly stands out: AIDS. Short for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, it was coined in 1982, but didn’t enter the general consciousness until about 1985. Previously it had been called GRID, for Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, but the name was changed – and, it must be said, the world’s attention perked up – after it was found to be infecting heterosexuals, particularly haemophiliacs. The name for the active agent in AIDS, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, was coined in May 1986 by a committee of virologists after a year in which the virus had gone by two names: LAV and HTLV3.
Before we leave the space age, one small rhetorical curiosity, which oddly failed to attract much attention at the time, needs mentioning. I refer to the utterance of Neil Armstrong when he became the first person to set foot on the moon. As millions of people watched, Armstrong sombrely announced: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ The sentence was reprinted in thousands of headlines the next morning, but in the excitement of his achievement no one seems to have noticed the tautology of it. According to the historian Richard Hanser, Armstrong was astonished and dismayed upon his return to his native planet to find that he had been misquoted everywhere. What he had said was, ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’ The indefinite article had been lost in transmission.32
A more thorny issue is whether, in light of developments of recent years, he should have engaged in such manifestly gender-biased speech. But that is another chapter.
21
American English Today
I
Few issues in America have soaked up more ink and excited more passion in recent years than the debate over education standards. Falling test scores, a perceived decline in literacy, and the frankly abysmal performance of American students compared with those of other nations, have all generated much journalistic hand-wringing.
Troubling indicators of educational failure are not hard to find. In a comparison of proficiency in mathematics among sixth formers from fifteen nations, the United States came twelfth in geometry and calculus and fourteenth in advanced algebra. (Hong Kong came first and Japan second in all three. England and Wales came third or fourth in all three.) In a similar comparison, American thirteen-year-olds did slightly better, though only slightly. Set against students from nineteen other countries, the US pupils came sixteenth in geometry, twelfth in algebra and tenth in arithmetic.1 The conclusion commonly drawn from this is that poor standards of education and economic decline go hand in hand. In 1992 Yoshio Sakurachi, the speaker of Japan’s lower house of Parliament, stirred a brief but vocal controversy when he attributed America’s poor economic performance to illiteracy among its workforce. One-third of American workers, Sakurachi declared, could not read. Many Americans were outraged by his utterances, not so much because they were inaccurate as because a Japanese had had the impertinence to express them.
In fact, no one knows how many Americans are illiterate. Defining literacy is a complicated matter. The US Department of Education divides literacy into three categories – prose literacy (as in books and newspapers), document literacy (as on order forms and tax returns) and quantitative literacy (involving the sort of mathematical skills necessary to calculate a 15 per cent tip, say) – and further breaks down each category into four levels, thus giving Americans twelve quite distinct ways in which to be literate or not. At the simplest level of prose literacy, according to the department’s criteria, a person should be able to write a simple declarative sentence describing the kind of job he or she wants. On this basis, 96.1 per cent of adult Americans are literate – a creditable, if not especially outstanding, performance compared with other nations. But at a slightly more demanding level of prose literacy – being able to read a leading article in a newspaper and briefly summarize its contents – the level of reading competence in America falls to 78.9 per cent. Put another way, slightly more than one American adult in five cannot read a newspaper effectively.2
By even the most conservative estimates, America has at least twenty million adults who cannot read well enough to understand the instructions on a medicine bottle or add and subtract with sufficient competence to tally a cheque-book.3 Probably the figure is much worse. Noting a ‘national tendency to graduate anyone who occupies a desk long enough’, the journalist Jonathan Maslow quotes a woman in Jackson, Mississippi, who told him: ‘I went through twelve years of school and two years of community college without ever learning to read, and passed with flying colours.’4
Signs of a national failure to educate students to even a ba
sic level are not hard to find. In Mississippi, almost half of the adults do not have a high school diploma. One-third of the people in Kentucky aged twenty-five or older are functionally illiterate.5 Throughout the country, large employers like Ford, Motorola and IBM routinely spend huge sums teaching their workers the basic skills that schools failed to impart. Just among private employers, the market for remedial reading textbooks is worth $750 million a year6 – good news for publishers, but hardly a source of pride for anyone else.
Any number of culprits have been cited for this national embarrassment. Some have blamed the shortness of American school days (six hours on average) and school years (175 to 180 days – only slightly shorter than England and Wales with 190).7 Others blame the states for neglecting the central role of education. In contrast to most other countries, public education is not the preserve of central government in the US. Standards of attainment and levels of funding are set by each state, and many, particularly in the deep South, have historically shown a less than wholehearted commitment to raising the levels of either. Until as recently as 1982 in Mississippi school attendance was not even mandatory. Previously each year up to six thousand children in Mississippi did not bother to start school.8
Still others attribute the decline in learning to a lack of encouragement and attention at home, as parents increasingly have become absent through work or divorce. The economist Victor Fuchs has calculated that parents in white households spend on average ten fewer hours per week with their children than they did in 1960. In black homes the decline has been even greater at twelve hours.9
