Bill Bryson

See also: quotes from the Bill Bryson books Mother Tongue & Troublesome Words

From Bill Bryson's African Diary by Bill Bryson:

"So how dangerous is Kenya then?" I asked in a small, controlled squeak.
"Oh, not at all," they responded in unison.
"Well, hardly," Will added.
"It depends on what you mean by dangerous, of course," said Dan.
"Like bleeding and not getting up again," I suggested. "Being shot and stabbed and so forth," I added.
They assured me that that only rarely happened, and that it was nearly always one or the other. You had to be very unlucky to be shot and stabbed, they said.
"It's mostly diseases you have to worry about," Nick went on. "Malaria, schistosomiasis, trypanosomiasis ..."
"Rift Valley fever, blackwater fever, yellow fever ..." said Dan.
"Dengue fever, bilharzia - the usual tropical stuff," added Will.
But they pointed out that you can be inoculated against many of those and for the rest most people manage a more or less complete recovery, given time and a considered programme of physiotherapy. Many even walk again. I asked if there was anything else I should know.
"Well, the roads are a little dangerous - there are some crazy drivers out there," Will said, chuckling.
"But apart from that and the diseases and the bandits and the railway from Nairobi to Mombasa, there's absolutely nothing to worry about," Nick added.
"What's wrong with the railway?"
"Oh, nothing really. It's just the rolling stock is a little antiquated and sometimes the brakes give out coming down out of the mountains - but hey, if you worried about all the things that might happen you wouldn't go anywhere, would you?"
"I don't go anywhere," I pointed out.
[p. 10-11]
"Oh, you will see plenty of Africa," Kentice assures me when we convene at the bar for a round of medicinal hydration. "We're going to show you lots of exotic things. Have you ever eaten camel?"
"Only in my junior high school cafeteria, and they called it lamb," I reply. [...]
[p. 14]

From Notes from a Big Country by Bill Bryson:

For complicated historical reasons, on American telephones all the punch buttons except 1 and 0 also come with three of the letters of the alphabet on them. Button 2 has ABC on it, button 3 has DEF, and so on.
A long time ago people realized that you could remember the numbers more easily if you relied on the letters rather than the numbers. In my hometown of Des Moines, for instance, in you wanted to call time - or the talking clock as you people so charmingly term it - the official number was 244-5646, which of course no one could recall. But if you dialed BIG JOHN you got the same number, and everybody could remember that (except, curiously, my mother, who was a bit hazy on the Christian name part, and so generally ended up asking the time of strangers whom she had just woken, but that's another story.
[From Coming Home, p. 21]

From Made In America by Bill Bryson (Black Swan books, 1994):

[...] They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and 13 pairs of boots. Yet between them they failed to bring a single cow or horse or plough or fishing line. [Bryson's ref: Vernon Heaton, The Mayflower, 1980, p. 80]
[Chapter 1, The Mayflower and Before, p. 5]
The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.
[Chapter 1, The Mayflower and Before, footnote p. 6]
Before long [...] the Pilgrims were thriving, and Indians and settlers were sitting down to a cordial Thanksgiving meal. [...]
A question that naturally arises in how they managed this. Algonquian, the language of the eastern tribes, is an extraordinarily complex and agglomerative tongue (or more accurately family of tongues), full of formidable consonant clusters [...] The answer [...] is that the Pilgrims didn't have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English. [...] The fact is that in 1620 the New World wasn't really so new at all.
[Chapter 1, The Mayflower and Before, p. 6-7]
The endearingly hopeless Martin Frobisher explored the Arctic region of Canada, found what he thought was gold and carried 1500 tons of it home on a dangerously overloaded boat only to be informed it was worthless iron pyrite. Undaunted, Frobisher returned to Canada, found another source of gold, carted 1300 tons of it back and was informed, no doubt with a certain weariness on the part of the royal assayer, that it was the same stuff. After that, we hear no more of Martin Frobisher.
[Chapter 1, The Mayflower and Before, p. 11]
We no longer use [...] ye for the. And that, incidentally, is all ye ever was - another way of writing the. It was a convenience for scribes and printers, a device that made it easier to justify lines. It was not pronounced 'yee'.
[...] The early [European] colonists [of North America] [...] were among the first to employ the more democratic forms ye and you in preference to the traditional thee, thy and thou [...] This ye [...] is etymologically distinct from the ye used as an alternative for the. As a pronoun ye was used for one person and you for more than one. Gradually this useful distinction fell out of use [...] But we kept the odd practice of associating [you] with a plural verb, which is why we address a single person with "you are" when logically we ought to say "you is". In fact, until about 1760 "you is" and "you was" were wholly unexeceptionable.
[Chapter 2, Becoming Americans, p. 17,22]
[The first colonists] brought many words with them that have not survived in either America or Britain, to the lexical impoverishment of both: flight for a dusting of snow, fribble for a frivolous person, bossloper for a hermit, spong for a parcel of land, bantling for an infant, sooterkin for a sweetheart, gurnet for a protective sandbar, and the much-missed slobberchops for a messy eater.
[Chapter 2, Becoming Americans, p. 25]
Servants were called indentured, incidentally, because their contract was indented, or folded, along an irregular line and torn in two, master and servant each keeping one half. [Bryson's ref: Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People, OUP, 1995, p. 41]
[Chapter 2, Becoming Americans, p. 35]
In 1739 the Spanish gave [the British and excuse to throw their weight around] when they made manifest their long and wholly understandable exasperation with British privateers by cutting off the ear of an English smuggler named Edward Jenkins. Never mind that Jenkins was little more than a common criminal. The British responded by launching possibly the only interesting-sounding conflict in history, the War of Jenkin's Ear.
[Chapter 2, Becoming Americans, p. 35]
Jefferson's draft of the Declaration [of Independence] contains several spellings and usages that strike us today [...] as irregular. For one thing, Jefferson always wrote it's for the possessive form of it, a practice that looks decidedly illiterate today. In fact, there was some logic to it. As a possessive form, the argument went, its required an apostrophe in precisely the same way as did words like children's or men's. Others contended, however, that in certain common words like ours and yours it was customary to dispense with the apostrophe, and that its belonged to this camp. By about 1815, the non-apostrophists had their way almost everywhere, but in 1776 it was a fine point, and one to which Jefferson clearly did not subscribe. [Bryson's ref: William Saffire, Coming to terms, Doubleday, 1991, p. 140]
[Chapter 3, A 'Democratical Phrenzy': America in the Age of Revolution, p. 53]
David Simpson observers in The Politics of American English [OUP, 1986, p. 23]: "Except for Samuel Johnson, no one in 1776, on either side of the ocean, seems to show much concern for a standard spelling practice."
[...] To begin with, such a statement contains the implied conceit that modern English is today somehow uniform in its spellings, which is far from true. In 1972 a scholar named Lee C. Deighton undertook the considerable task of comparing the spellings of every word in four leading American dictionaries and found there are no fewer than 1,770 common words in modern English in which there is no general agreement on the preferred spelling. [...] The dictionaries are equally - we might fairly say hopelessly - split on whether to write discussible or discussable, eyeopener, eye opener or, eye-opener, dumfound or, dumbfound, gladiolus (for the plural), gladioli or, gladioluses, gobbledegook or, gobbledygook, licenceable or, licensable, and many hundreds of others. The champion of orthographic uncertainty appears to be panatela, which can also pass muster as panatella, panetela or panetella.
[Chapter 3, A 'Democratical Phrenzy': America in the Age of Revolution, p. 53-54]
Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when the delegates [to the second Continental Congress] might have been expected to occupy themselves with more pressing concerns - like how they were going to win the war and escape hanging - Congress quite extraordinarily found time to debate the business of a motto for the new nation. Their choice, E Pluribus Unum, "One From Many", was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.
[Chapter 3, A 'Democratical Phrenzy': America in the Age of Revolution, p. 55]
Typical of the age was Charles Goodyear, the man who gave the world vulcanised rubber. Goodyear personified most of the qualities of the classic American Inventor - total belief in the product, years of sacrifice, blind devotion to an idea - but with one engaging difference. He didn't have the faintest idea what he was doing. Described by one biographer as a "gentle lunatic", Goodyear in 1834 became fascinated with rubber. It was a wonderfully promising material - pliant, waterproof, rugged and durable - but it had many intractable shortcomings. For one thing, it had a low melting-point. Boots made of rubber were fine in winter, but at the first sign of warm weather they would gooily decompose and begin to stink.
Goodyear decided to make it his life's work to solve these problems. To say that he became obsessed only begins to hint at the degree of his commitment. Over the next nine years, he sold or pawned everything he owned, raced through his friends' and family's money, occasionally resorted to begging, and generally inflicted loving but untold hardship on his long-suffering wife and numerous children. He turned the family kitchen into a laboratory and, with only the most basic understanding of the chemistry involved, frequently filled the house with noxious gases and at least once nearly asphyxiated himself. Nothing he tried worked. To demonstrate the material's versatility, he took to wearing a suit made entirely of rubber, but this merely underlined its acute malodorousness and its owner's faltering grip on reality. Amazingly, everyone stood by him. His wife did whatever he asked of her and relatives gladly handed him their fortunes. One brother-in-law parted with $46,000 and never whimpered when all it resulted in was tubs of noisome slop. With implacable resolve Goodyear churned out one product after another - rubber, mailbags, life-preservers, boots, rainwear - that proved disastrously ineffective. Even with the lavish support of friends and relatives, Goodyear several times ended up in debtors' prisons. In 1840, when his two-year-old son died, the family couldn't even afford a coffin.
Finally in 1843, entirely by accident, he had his breakthrough. He spilled some India rubber and sulphur on the top of his stove and in so doing discovered the secret of producing a rubber that was waterproof, pliant, resistant to extremes of heat and cold, made an ideal insulator, didn't break when dropped or struck, and, above all, was practically odourless. Goodyear hastily secured a patent and formed the Naugatuck India-Rubber Company. At long last he and his family were poised for the fame and fortune that their years of sacrifice so clearly warranted.
It was not to be. Goodyear's process was so easily duplicated that other manufacturers simply stole it. Even the name by which the process became known, vulcanization, was coined by an English pirate. Goodyear had endless problems protecting his patents. The French gave him a patent but then withdrew it on a technicality, and when he travelled to France to protest the matter, he found himself tossed yet again into a debtors' prison. He made more money from his autobiography - a book with the slightly less than compelling title Gum-Elastic - than he ever did from his invention. When he died in 1860, he left his family saddled with debts. The company that proudly bears his name, the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, had nothing to do with him or his descendants. It was named Goodyear by two brothers in Akron, Ohio, Frank and Charles Sieberling, who simply admired him.
[Chapter 6, We're in the Money: The Age of Invention, p. 107-108]
At first people were not sure what to say in response to a ringing phone. Edison thought callers should answer with a jaunty "Ahoy!" and that was the word habitually used by the first telephone operator, one George Coy of New Haven. (Only male operators were employed at first. As so often happens with new technologies, women weren't allowed anywhere near it until the novelty had worn off.) Others said, "Yes!" or "What?" and many merely picked up the receiver and listened hopefully. The problem was such that magazines ran long articles explaining the etiquette of phone use.
Today, America is the most phone-dependent nation on earth. Ninety-three percent of American homes have a phone and almost 70 per cent have two phones, a level of penetration no other nation but Canada comes anywhere near equalling, and each household makes or receives on average 3,516 calls per year, a figure astonishing to almost all other people in the world.
[Chapter 6, We're in the Money: The Age of Invention, p. 113-114]
Curiously, although everyone refers to the object as a light bulb, few dictionaries do. The American Heritage (first edition) has [...] no light bulb. If you wish to know what that object is, you must look under incandescent light, electric light or electric lamp. Funk & Wagnalls Revised Standard Dictionary devotes 6,500 words to light and its derivatives, but again makes no mention of light bulb. Webster's Second New International similarly makes no mention of light bulb. The third edition does - although it has just this to say: "light bulb n: incandescent lamp". [...]
[Chapter 6, We're in the Money: The Age of Invention, p. 118]
Soon after the Milwaukee Railroad began laying track across Washington state in the 1870s, a vice-president of the company was given the task of naming thirty-two new communities that were to be built along the line. Evidently not a man with poetry in his soul, he appears to have selected the names by wandering through his house and choosing whatever objects his eye happened to light on. He named the towns after everything from poets [...] and plays [...] to common household foods (Ralston and Purina) [...]
[...] The is almost nothing, it would appear, that hasn't inspired an American place name at some time or other. In addition to breakfast foods and Shakespearean plays, Americans have had towns named for radio programmers (Truth or Consequences, New Mexico), [...] tows that you may give thanks you don't come from (Toad Suck, Arkansas, and Idiotville, Oregon, spring to mind) [...] and thousands upon thousands with more prosaic or boring etymologies (not forgetting Boring, Maryland).
[Chapter 7, Names, p. 122-123]
[...] Probably the liveliest diversity of spellings belongs to Chicago, which in its early days was rendered as Shuerkaigo, Psceschaggo, Shikkago, Tsckakko, Ztschaggo, Shecago, Shekakko, Stkachango and almost any other remotely similar combination you could think of.
[Chapter 7, Names, p. 124]
Indian names frequently evolved into forms that disguised their native origins. [...] Moskitu-auke became, almost inevitably, Mosquito Hawk. [...] No Man's Land island in Massachusetts commemorates not some forgotten incident, but is taken from an Indian chief named Tequenoman. The list goes on and on. Ticklenaked, Smackover, Phomoonshine, Poo Run, Zilly Boy and countless others are the result of the confusion or the comic adaptability of early colonial settlers.
Non-Indian names likewise sometimes underwent a kind of folk evolution [...] Newport News has nothing to do with news; it was originally New Port Newce and named for the Newce family that settled there. [Bryson's source: George R. Stewart, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, 1945, p. 64]
[...]
Often Americans arrived in a place to find it already named. The process began with the names the Dutch left behind when they gave up their hold on Nieuw Amsterdam. [...] Vlissingen was transformed into Flushing [...] Deutel Bogt begat Turtle Bay, Vlachte Bosch became Flatbush [...]
[Chapter 7, Names, p. 124-125,127]
[...] Iowa began life as the somewhat formidable Ouaouiatonon. [...]
[...] Chicago appears to be from an Indian word meaning "place that stinks of onions" [...]
[Chapter 7, Names, p. 128]
Often [...] these names left behind by the French and Spanish had to be shortened, re-spelled, or otherwise modified to make them sit more comfortably on English-speaking tongues. Thus L'Eau Froid ("cold water"), a lake in Arkansas, was turned into Low Freight. [...] Les Mont Verts became Lemon Fair. [...]
[Chapter 7, Names, p. 129]
[...] oddball names know no geographical bounds, as a brief sampling shows:
- Who'd A Thought It, Alabama [...]
- Greasy Corner, Toad Suck and Turkey Scratch, Arkansas [...]
- Tightwad, Peculiar and Jerk Tail, Missouri [...]
- Brainy Boro and Cheesequake, New Jersey
- Rabbit Shuffle, Stiffknee Knob and Shoofly, North Carolina [...]
- Yell, Bugscuffle, Gizzards Cove and Zu Zu, Tennessee
- Lick Skillet, Bugtussle, Chocolate Bayou, Ding Dong, Looneyville, Jot 'Em Down, and Cut and Shoot, Texas
- Lick Fork, Unthanks and Tizzle Flats, Virginia [...]
- Superior Bottom, West Virginia
- Embarrass, Wisconsin
[Chapter 7, Names, p. 131]
Changing their names is something that towns do more often than you might think. [..] Scranton, Pennsylvania, has gone through no fewer than eight names, the most notable of which was its first: Skunk's Misery. Mellifluousness is generally given priority over etymological considerations, as with Glendale, California, a name that combines the Scottish-Gaelic glen with the northern English dale to form a name that means "valley-valley".
[Chapter 7, Names, p. 132]
Vermont was called generally New Connecticut until the inhabitants came up with the contrived, and inescapably nonsensical, name Vermont. If, as is apparent, their intention was to name it for the Green Mountains, they should have called it Les Monts Verts. As it is, in so far as it means anything at all, it means "worm-mountain". [Bryson's source: George R. Stewart, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, 1945, p. 166-167]
[Chapter 7, Names, p. 134-135]
Mencken quotes a tale from Samuel Pepys's diary about a Dr Levy who had petitioned a court to let him change his name to Sullivan and then a month later sought permission to change it against to Kilpatrick. "On request for the reason, he telleth ye court that ye patients continually ask of him, 'What was your name before?' If granted ye change, he shall then tell them 'Sullivan'." [Bryson's source: H. L. Mencken, The American Language, supplement 2, 1948, p. 597]
[Chapter 7, Names, p. 142-143]
Yet relatively few of [Lewis and Clark's] geographic names survived. They gave the noble name Philanthropy River to a tributary of the Missouri, but it didn't stick. Later passers-by renamed it Stinking Water.
[Chapter 8, "Manifest Destiny": Taming the West, p. 147]
Many of the terms we most closely associate with cowboys and life amid the purple sage didn't appear in the West until much later, if at all. Dogy, a motherless calf [...] has not been found earlier than 1903. Hoosegow, for a jail, didn't enter the language until 1920. [...] Bounty hunter, gunslinger, and to have an itchy trigger finger were all the inventions of Hollywood script writers. [Bryson's source: Washington Post, 8 December 1989, p. C5] [...]
[...] Often these [Spanish] words had to be wrestled into shape. Wrangler comes from caballerangero. Vamos became vamoose and then mosey. Vaquero, literally "cow handler", went through any number of variations [...] before finally settling into English as buckaroo. The ten-gallon hat is named not for its capacity to hold liquids (it would have to be the size of a bath-tub for that) but for the braid with which it was decorated, the Spanish for braid is galón.
[...] Many other terms that are sometimes lumped in with Spanish expressions brought into English by cowboys and ranchers actually entered English much earlier [...] the [Spanish] el lagarto, "the lizard", [...] became naturalised in English as alligator.
[Chapter 8, "Manifest Destiny": Taming the West, p. 158-160]
[...] Among other similar words [for unsophisticated rustics] were hayseed, bumpkin, rube (from Reuben), country jake and jay, which eventually gave us the term jaywalker - that is, an innocent who doesn't know how to cross a city street.
[Chapter 10, When the Going was Good: Travel in America, p. 190]
[...] An unusual feature of Conestoga wagons was that they were built with their brakes and "lazy boards" - a kind of extendible running-board - on the left-hand side. If there was a particular reason for putting them there, it has since been forgotten. With drivers compelled to sit on the left, they tended to drive on the right so that they were positioned near the centre of the road, which is why, it appears, Americans abandoned the British custom of driving on the left.
[Chapter 10, When the Going was Good: Travel in America, p. 191]
From virtually nothing in 1830, the mileage of American railroads rose to 30,000 by 1860 - that is, more than all the rest of the world put together - and to a staggering 200,000 by 1890. [Bryson's source: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The American Civil War, OUP, 1990, New York, 1986, p. 37] Rail travel so dominated American travel that for four generations road meant railroad. What Americans now call roads were more generally known as trails [...] [Bryson's source: Phil Paton, Open Road: A Celebration of the American Highway, Simon & Schuster, 1986, p. 37]
[Chapter 10, When the Going was Good: Travel in America, p. 193]
Bum, in the sense of a tramp appears to be a shortening of the German Bummler, a loafer and ne'er-do-well.
[Chapter 10, When the Going was Good: Travel in America, p. 194]
[...] Between 1922 and 1932 the number of streetcar miles in America almost halved. In that same decade, a company called National City Lines - a cartel made up of General Motors and a collection of oil and rubber interests - began buying up trolley lines and converting them to bus routes. By 1950 it had closed down the streetcar systems of more than a hundred cities, including those of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore and St Louis. Its actions were unquestionably illegal and the company was eventually taken to court and convicted of engaging in a criminal conspiracy. The fine: just $5,000, less than the cost of a new bus.
[Chapter 10, When the Going was Good: Travel in America, p. 196]
Although the early technological developments were almost exclusively German, it was the French who became the first big manufacturers of cars and thus gave us many of the words associated with motoring - chassis, garage, chauffeur, carburettor, coupé, limousine and of course automobile. Chauffeur was a term for a ship's stoker and as such was applied to drivers of cars in at least a mildly sarcastic sense. Limousine was originally a heavy shepherd's cloak from the Limousin region of France. The first chauffeurs, forced to sit in the open air, adopted this coat and gradually the word was transferred itself from the driver to the vehicle. By 1902 it was part of the English language. [Bryson's source: Craig M. Carver, A History of English in Its Own Words, HarperCollins, 1982, p. 243]
[Chapter 10, When the Going was Good: Travel in America, p. 198]
An exciting new vocabulary emerged. Not everyone could yet afford to go autobubbling (dated to 1900, a racy if short-lived term for a pleasure spin), but soon people were bandying about terms like road-hog (a term originally applied to bicyclists in 1893), [...]
[Chapter 10, When the Going was Good: Travel in America, p. 201]
In 1924 a [drive-in chain] called A&W [...] opened for business. Its main contribution to American culture was the invention of "tray girls", who brought the food to patrons' cars, saving them the emotional upheaval of having to be parted even briefly from their surrogate wombs. [Bryson's source: Chester H. Liebs, Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture, 1985, p. 208]
[...] the Cozy Dog Drive-In [...] whose proud boast it was to have invented corn dogs in 1949, though it called them "crusty curs".
[Chapter 10, When the Going was Good: Travel in America, p. 206]
the Pilgrims showed a grim reluctance to eat anything that did not come from their dwindling stockpile of salt pork (which they called "salt horse"), salt fish and salt beef, hard tack (a kind of biscuit backed so hard that it became more or less impervious to mould, weevils and human teeth) [...]
[Chapter 11, What's Cooking? Eating in America, p. 215]
A similar linguistic misunderstanding obtained with another native American food, the Jerusalem artichoke, which is not an artichoke at all - indeed it doesn't even look like an artichoke - but rather is the root of the sunflower Helianthus tuberosus. Jerusalem is merely a corruption of the Italian word for sunflower, girasole.
[...] [in] 1796, the first American cookbook - a slender volume with the dauntingly all-embracing title of American Cookery, or the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Pâtés, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves and All Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plumb to Plain Cake, Adapted to this Country and All Grades of Life, by Amelia Simmons: An American Orphan [...]
[...] The principal repast was taken at midday and called dinner. Supper, a word related to soup [...] was often just that - a little soup with perhaps a piece of bread - and was consumed in the evening shortly before retiring. Lunch was a concept yet unknown, as was the idea of a snack. To the early colonists, "snack" meant the bite of a dog.
[...] The Pilgrims naturally brought many Old World dishes with them, among them flummery (a sweet dish made of flour or cornstarch, sufficiently insipid to still be eaten in England, where it is called blancmange) [...]
[Chapter 11, What's Cooking? Eating in America, p. 219-220]
Gradually even poorer Americans became acquainted with a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, though the linguistic evidence shows that they weren't always quite sure what to make of them. For the potato alone, the Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles records such arresting nineteenth-century concoctions as potato custard, potato chowder, potato pone, potato pudding and even potato coffee. We can assume that most of these were consumed in a spirit of experimentation or desperation and that most didn't survive long in the native diet.
[Chapter 11, What's Cooking? Eating in America, p. 224]
The word [cafeteria] came from Cuban Spanish [...] Cafeterias proved so popular that they spawned a huge, if mercifully short-lived, vogue for words of a similar form: washeteria, groceteria, caketeria, drugeteria, bobateria (a place where hair was bobbed), beauteria, chocolateria, shaveteria, smoketeria, hardware-ateria, garmenteria, furnitureteria - even casketeria for a funeral home and the somewhat redundant restauranteria.
[Chapter 11, What's Cooking? Eating in America, p. 227]
Fleischmann's Yeast not only soothed frayed nerves and loosed the bowels, but also dealt vigorously with indigestion, skin disorders, tooth decay, obesity and a vague but ominous-sounding disorder called "fallen stomach". Fleischmann's kept up these sweeping claims - occasionally added to them - until ordered to desist by the Federal Trade Commission in 1938 on the grounds that there wasn't a shred of evidence to support any of them. [Bryson's source: Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet, OUP, 1988, p. 198-199]
[Chapter 11, What's Cooking? Eating in America, p. 231]
Among the many hundreds of other candy bars loosed on a willing nation during [the 1920s was] the intriguing Vegetable Sandwich. Made of chocolate-covered vegetables it was sold with the solemn assurance that "it will not constipate". As might have been predicted, constipation was not a compelling consideration among America's children and the Vegetable Sandwich soon disappeared from the scene. [...] Curiously, none of these products was known as a candy bar. The term is not recorded in print until 1943.
[...] [Double Bubble Gum] was invented [in 1928] by Frank H. Fleer, whose earlier gum, Blibber-Blubber, was something of a failure - it tended to dissolve in the mouth but to stick tenaciously to everything else, including Junior's face [...]
[Chapter 11, What's Cooking? Eating in America, p. 233-234]
Cock ale was never a popular drink - even in that adventurous age few thought of chicken soup as a distinguished addition to the punch bowl [...]
[Chapter 11, What's Cooking? Eating in America, p. 238]
The widespread American habit of chewing tobacco and disposing of the excess juice by expectorating in the approximate direction of a brass spittoon also excited much comment. Both houses of Congress, Dickens recorded in American Notes, "are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honourable member is accommodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction, do not admit of being described."
[Chapter 13, Domestic Matters, p. 260]
Almost overnight America became the most illuminated country in the world. By the 1890s Boradway was already being described as "the Great White Way" because of its dazzling lights (almost all of them advertising products). People came from all over just to see the lights, which included the world's first flashing sign, for Manhattan Beach and its hotels. Standing 50 feet high and 80 feet wide, the sign would light up line by line and then flash rhythmically before starting the cycle over again. It seemed a wonder of modern technology. In fact it was manually operated by a man in a rooftop shack.
In 1920 Broadway got a sign that was a wonder of electrical engineering. Rising the equivalent of seven storeys above the rooftop of the Hotel Normandie and incorporating 20,000 coloured light-bulbs, it offered in intricate detail the illusion of a 30-second chariot race, complete with cracking whips and flying dust. People were so agog that squads of police had to be assigned to the area to keep pedestrians and traffic moving lest the whole of Manhattan grind to a halt. [Bryson's source: David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, MIT Press, 1990, p. 52] Almost as arresting were the lights of Luna Park on Coney Island. Two hundred thousand bulbs picked out ornamental patterns and the outlines of the towers and minarets at the amusement park, turning it literally into a night-time wonderland. [Bryson's source: American Heritage, November 1979, p. 78] Even now it looks quite wonderful in pictures.
[Chapter 13, Domestic Matters, p. 265]
The idea of the refrigerator might have been new but the word wasn't. It had existed in English since 1611, and had been used as a synonym for icebox since 1824.
[Chapter 13, Domestic Matters, p. 266]
[...] Almost all [of the early TV quiz shows] relied on the formula of ending the shows with the winning contestant having to defer until the following week to take his or her winnings or press on at the risk of losing all, thereby ensuring a supply of eagerly returning viewers.
The difficulty was that contestants had an exasperating tendency to blow an answer late in the programme, thus precluding the possibility of an even more exciting return performance the following week. To get around the problem the producers of several shows hit simultaneously on a simple expedient. They cheated. Each week they supplied selected contestants - among them a respected minister from New Jersey - with the correct answers, which made the results rather easier to forecast. Unfortunately they failed to consider that some contestants, having got a taste of success, would grow miffed when the producers decided that their reign should end. A contestant named Herbert Stempel blew the whistle on Twenty-One when its producers told him to "take a dive", and soon contestants from several other quiz shows were sheepishly admitting that they too had been supplied with answers.
[Chapter 13, Domestic Matters, p. 272-273]
[In 1954] another durable household appliance entered the world: the microwave oven. The first was called the Radarange. It was large and bulky - it weighed over 700lb. [318kg] - required a lot of complicated cooling apparatus and didn't cook food very well. [...]
[Chapter 13, Domestic Matters, p. 273]
Leisure in any meaningful sense is actually quite a modern concept. [...] For millions of people a vacation was a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence that they experienced only on their honeymoon, or bridal tour, as it was often called until about 1900. Honeymoon has existed in English since 1546, but originally signified only the first month of marriage. It didn't become associated with a trip away from home until about the middle of the nineteenth century.
Weekend is an even more recent concept. The word was coined in 1879 in England, but didn't become part of the average American's vocabulary until as recently as the 1930s. Well into the 1900s most people worked a sixty-hour, six-day week [...]
Today, according to some studies, Americans work [...] longer than at any time since the forty-hour week became standard. [...] people have been driven to seek overtime, take second jobs or simply show a zealous commitment to the workplace lest they find themselves the victims of restructuring, premature retirement, coerced transition, constructive dismissal, skill mix redeployment or any of the other forty or so euphemisms for being laid off that the managing director of Executive Recruiter News reported in 1991. [Bryson's ref: Utica Observer, NY, 4 March 1991] Of which Digital Equipment Corporation's involuntary methodologies was perhaps the most chillingly recondite.
Across the economy as a whole, it has been estimated, the average American works 163 hours more per year today than two decades ago. [...]
[Chapter 13, Domestic Matters, p. 274-275]
Very early on, advertisers discovered the importance of a good slogan. [...] Heinz's "57 varieties" [dates from 1896]. Morton Salt's "when it rains, it pours" dates from 1911. [..] The great thing about a slogan was that it didn't have to be accurate to be effective. Heinz never actually had "57 varieties" of anything. The catch-phrase arose because H.J. Heinz, the company's founder, decided he liked the sound of the number. Undeterred by considerations of verity, he had the slogans slapped on every one of the products he produced, which in 1896 was already far more than fifty-seven. [...]
[...] Typical of the genre [of giveaways] was a turn-of-the-century tome called The Vital Question Cook Book, which was promoted as an aid to livelier meals, but which proved upon receipt to contain 112 pages of recipes all involving the use of Shredded Wheat. Many of these had a certain air of desperation about them, notably the "Shredded Wheat Biscuit Jellied Apple Sandwich" and the "Creamed Spinach on Shredded Wheat Biscuit Toast". Almost all in fact involved nothing more than spooning some everyday food on to a piece of shredded wheat and giving it an inflated name.
[Chapter 14, The Hard Sell: Advertising in America, p. 282-283]
Where commercial products of the late 1940s had scientific-sounding names, those of the 1950s relied on increasingly secret ingredients. Gleem toothpaste contained a mysterious piece of alchemy called GL-70. Consumers were never given the slightest hint of what GL-70 was, but it would, according to the advertising, not only rout odour-causing bacteria, but "wipe out their enzymes!" For purposes of research, I wrote to Proctor & Gamble, Gleem's manufacturer, asking what GL-70 was, but the public relations department evidently thought it eccentric of me to wonder what I had been putting in my mouth all through childhood and declined to reply.
[Chapter 14, The Hard Sell: Advertising in America, p. 291]
Truth has seldom been a particularly visible feature of American advertising. In the early 1970s, Chevrolet ran a series of ads for the Chevelle, boasting that the car had "109 advantages to keep it from becoming old before its time". When looked into, it turned out that these 109 vaunted features included such items as rear-view mirrors, reversing lights, balanced wheels and many other such items that were considered pretty well basic to any car. [...] At about the same time, Ford, not to be outdone, introduced a "limited edition Mercury Monarch at $250 below the normal list price. It achieved this by taking $250 worth of equipment off the standard Monarch. [Bryson's source: Jeffrey Schrank, Snap, Crackle and Popular Taste: The Illusion of Free Choice in America, 1977, p. 101]
And has all this deviousness led to a tightening of the rules concerning what is allowable in advertising? Hardly. In 1986, as William Lutz relates in Doublespeak [1989], the insurance company John Hancock launched an ad campaign in which "real people in real situations" discussed their financial predicaments with remarkable candour. When a journalist asked to speak to these real people, a company spokesman conceded thay they were actors and "in that sense they are not real people" [Lutz, p. 82]. During the 1982 presidential election campaign, the Republican National Committee ran a television advertisement praising President Reagan for providing cost-of-living pay increases to federal workers "in spite of those sticks-in-the-mud who tried to keep him doing from what we elected him to do". When it was pointed out that the increases had in fact been mandated by law since 1975 and that Reagan had in any case three times tried to block them, a Republican official responded: "Since when is a commercial supposed to be accurate?" [Lutz, p. 16-17] Quite.
[...] Spanish is a particular problem [for advertising] In mainstream Spanish bichos means insects, but in Puerto Rico it means testicles, so when a pesticide maker promised to bring death to the bichos Puerto Rican consumers were at least bemused, if not alarmed.
[Chapter 14, The Hard Sell: Advertising in America, p. 292-293]
It would be putting it mildly to say that [Samuel] Goldwyn never entirely mastered the nuances of English. Though many of the expressions attributed to him are apocryphal [...] he did actually say "I was on the brink of an abscess", "Gentlemen, include me out", and "You've bitten the hand of the goose that laid the golden egg". Warned that a Broadway production to which he had acquired rights was "a very caustic play", he shot back: "I don't give a damn how much it costs." And a close friend swore that once when they were walking on a beach and the friend said, "Look at the gulls," Goldwyn stopped in his tracks and replied in all seriousness "How do you know they're not boys?"
[Chapter 15, The Movies, p. 303-304]
[...] The ultimate in screen credits, though, was almost certainly the 1929 production of The Taming of the Shrew, [...] which contained the memorable line: "By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor." [The Economist, 2 October 1993, p. 108] Possibly the most choleric credit line appeared on the 1974 movie The Taking of Pelham 123, which concerned the hijacking of a New York subway train and finished with the closing line: "Made without any help whatsoever from the New York Transport Authority."
[Chapter 15, The Movies, p. 308-309]
[...] Christmas as now celebrated is a mongrel accumulation of practices from many lands.
Gift-giving, which has no intrinsic connection with Christmas, was borrowed from Holland. From the Middle Ages, the Dutch had made a custom of giving presents to children on 6 December, St Nicholas's Day. St Nicholas was a shadowy figure from Asia Minor whose many kindly deeds included bestowing bags of gold on three young women who otherwise faced a life of prostitution. Over times those three bags evolved into three golden balls and became, by some complicated leap of logic, the three balls associated with pawnbroking. [...]
The Christmas tree and the practice of sending greeting cards arrived from Germany [...] The first mention of a Christmas tree in America in in 1846. Carols, mistletoe, holly and the yule log all come from Britain, mostly as survivors of a pre-Christian past. (Yule itself is pre-Saxon Germanic and evidently commemorates a forgotten pagan festival).
[...] It may come as a surprise to learn that there are no official holidays in America. One of the rights reserved to the states was the prerogative to declare holidays. The President can, with the assent of Congress, declare "legal public holidays", but these apply only to the District of Columbia and federal employees. They have no formal sanction elsewhere.
[Chapter 16, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play, p. 318-319]
[...] faro, a [card] game first mentioned in Britain in 1713. Corrupted from pharaoh (a pharaoh was pictured on one of the cards in a faro deck; it later evolved into the king of hearts), faro was a dauntingly complicated game in terms of equipment, scoring, betting and vocabulary. Each card dealt had a name of obscure significance. The first was the soda card, the second the loser, and so on to the final card, the hock. Scoring was kept track of on an abacus-like device called a case, from which is said to come the expression an open and shut case. To break even and to play both ends against the middle also originated in faro, as did the practice of referring to counters as chips (previously they had been called checks). Thus most of the many expressions involving chips - to cash in one's chips, to be in the chips, a blue-chip investment - owe their origins to this now forgotten game.
[Chapter 16, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play, p. 318-319]
[...] Jackpot is of uncertain provenance. The jack may refer to the card of that name or to the slang term for money, or possibly it may be simply another instance of the largely inexplicable popularity of jack as a component with which to build words: jackhammer, jackknife, jackboot, jackass, jackass, jack-in-the-box, jack-o'-lantern, jack-of-all-trades, jackrabbit, jackstraw, jackdaw, jackdaw, jackanapes, lumberjack and car jack. In none of these, so far as is known, does jack contain any particular significance. People clearly just liked the sound of it.
[Chapter 16, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play, p. 319]
In New Orleans the game the English called hazzard became known as crabs, which mutated over time into craps. It has no etymological connection to the slang term for faeces. The French were also ultimately responsible for keno (from quine, "a set of five"), an early form of bingo that was once very popular [...]
[...] [the card game] bridge. which arrived [in America] from Russia and the Middle East in the early 1890s. The word is unrelated to the type of bridge that spans a river. It comes from the Russian birich, the title of a town crier. Among the expressions that have passed from the bridge table to the world at large are bid, to follow suit, in spades, long suit and renege. [Bryson's source: J. L. Dillard, American Talk: Where Our Words Come From, 1977, p. 74]
[Chapter 16, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play, p. 322]
[...] Before an Englishman named J. I. Stassen coined the term bicycle in 1869, two-wheeled vehicles had gone by a variety of names: velocipedes, dandy horses, draisines and boneshakers. [...]
[...] Cycling quickly developed its own complex terminology. The more energetic adherents went in for scorching or freewheeling [...] Scorchers who showed a selfish disregard of others were known as road hogs. Such was their capacity to startle or surprise other road users [...] that in some places laws were passed requiring cyclists not simply to slow down and dismount when approaching a horse, but to lead it to safety before continuing. [Bryson's source: John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, MIT Press, 1971, p. 29]
[...] A large part of bicycling's popularity was that it was one of the few exhilarating enjoyments permitted to women, though some authorities worried that perhaps it was too exhilarating. The Georgia Journal of Medicine and Surgery for one believed that cycling was unsuitable for females because the movements of the legs and the pressure on the pelvis of the saddle were bound to arouse "feelings hitherto unrealized by the young maiden". [Bryson's source: Robert Atwan, Donald McQuade & John W. Wright: Edsels, Luckies and Frigidaires: Advertising the American Way, The Road and the Car in American Life, 1979, p. 151-152] The Wheelman magazine defended bicycling as a healthy pursuit for women, but added this ominous warning to its female readers: "Do not think of sitting down to table until you have changed your underclothing."
[Chapter 16, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play, p. 325-326]
[In 1903] Henry Chadwick, editor of the respected Baseball Guide, wrote a short history of the game in which he traced its probable origins to rounders and cricket. The patriotic [Albert Goodwill] Spalding [former outstanding ball player, and by 1903 a very wealthy man and a figure of godlike authority among baseball followers] was mortified at the thought that baseball might not be an all-American invention. After stewing over the matter for two years, in 1903 he appointed a six-man commission to look into the question. The commission was guided by A. G. Mills, president of the National [Baseball] League and, it so happened, a friend for thirty years of the recently deceased [Abner] Doubleday. In 1907 the commission issued a report in which it stated without substantiation that the game was created by Doubleday at Coopertown, New York, in 1839. When pressed for details, Mills revealed that he had heard the story from "a reputable gentleman" named Albert Graces, whose word he had accepted without question. (Graves would shortly end up in a lunatic asylum).
To anyone who looked into the matter even slightly, it was obvious that the story didn't hold water. [...] At his death, Doubleday had left sixty-seven diaries and not once in any of them did he mention baseball. Finally, if Mill's story is to be believed, never in their thirty years of close friendship had Doubleday thought to mention to Mills that he had invented the game from which Mills was making his living.
[Chapter 16, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play, p. 329-330]
Umpire, incidentally, is one of those many words in which an initial n became attached, like a charged particle, to the preceding indefinite article. In Middle English, one was "a noumpere", just as an apron was at first "a napron".
[Chapter 16, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play, p. 330]
A raincheck [first recorded use in 1884] was - indeed still is - another name for a ticket stub. If the [baseball] game was rained out in the first five innings, the customer could gain free admission to any later match by presenting his raincheck. Hence, the use of the term in the general sense of a deferred get-together.
[Chapter 16, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play, p. 333]
[In the 1920s] golf became associated with two rather odd items of clothing. The first was knickerbockers, a nonce word coined by Washington Irving in 1809 [...] By means that escape rational explanation, the word attached itself first to women's underwear (which are to this day called knickers almost everywhere in the English-speaking world but North America0, and then, but a further dazzling flight, to the shorted trousers favoured by golfers in the 1920s, and whose continued existence appears to be the odd and, I would have thought, little-encouraged quest of Mr Payne Stewart. Golf knickers further begat another short-lived item of apparel, the plus fours, so called because they were four inches longer than knickers. [Bryson's source: Alfred H. Holt, Phrase and Word Origins, Dover, 1961, p. 154]
[Chapter 16, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sport and Play, p. 338]
Caucus, from an Algonquian word for counsellor, dates from the early seventeenth century, and as such is one of the oldest surviving Americanisms. Mugwump (at first often spelled mugquomp), another Algonquianism, [...] made its first recorded appearance in 1643. For two hundred years it retained its original sense of a chief or leader before abruptly shifting in the 1880s to describe a political maverick. (The oft quoted definition is that a mugwump is someone who sits with his mug on one side of the fence and his wump on the other.)
[Chapter 17, Of Bombs and Bunkum: Politics and War, p. 340]
The oddest and certainly the most historically complicated borrowing is filibuster. It began as the Dutch vrijbuiter, a pirate. To English speakers vrijbuiter naturally yielded freebooter. But vrijbuiter was beyond the command of Spanish tongues. They converted the word to filibustero. The French then borrowed it as filibustier. Thus by 1585 vrijbuiter had given English two words with the same meaning. Freebooter went no further, but filibuster had a busy career ahead of it in American politics. First, still bearing something of its original sense, it came to describe Americans who formed private armies with a view to taking over Central American countries, for which there was a short but persistent fashion in the 1850s (the idea of manifest destiny rather going to some people's heads).
[...] By the mid-1850s [filibuster] was being used in Congress to describe any vaguely disruptive debating tactic, and by the 1880s had settled into its present sense of a willful delaying action designed to thwart the passage of a bill.
[Chapter 17, Of Bombs and Bunkum: Politics and War, p. 342-343]
We have been conditioned by Hollywood to think of Union soldiers dressed identically in blue and Confederate troops in grey. In fact, for the first year or so of [the American Civil War] most soldiers wore the uniforms of their state militias, which came in any number of colours [...] leading to endless confusion on the battlefield. [...] the War Department rushed into production of thousands of standard uniforms. These were manufactured with an old process employing recycled woollen fibres and known as shoddy. Because the uniforms were poorly made easily came unstitched, shoddy came to denote any article of inferior quality. The system of producing uniforms en masse also led, incidentally, to the introduction of standard graduated sizes, a process that was carried over to civilian life after the war. [Bryson's source: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The American Civil War, OUP, 1990, New York, 1986, p. 323-325]
[Chapter 17, Of Bombs and Bunkum: Politics and War, p. 349-350]
A final, incidental linguistic legacy of the war between the states was the term sideburns, named for the Union command Ambrose E. Burnside, whose distinctive mutton-chop whiskers inspired a fashion and became known as burnsides. Within a decade the syllables had been transposed, but quite how or why is anyone's guess. [...] But the outbreak of [...] World War I prompted an outpouring of new terms [...] From France, meanwhile, came [...] camouflage (rather oddly from camouflet, meaning "to blow smoke up someone's nose", a pastime that appears on the linguistic evidence to be specific to the French) [...]
[Chapter 17, Of Bombs and Bunkum: Politics and War, p. 350-351]
[In 1951 ...] With the eyes of America one him, Judge Andrew Doyle ruled that as art the photograph [of a nude woman view from the back] was perfectly acceptable, but that as a bar-room decoration it was "unquestionably obscene". He suggested - apparently seriously - that one of the city's art galleries might like to take it over. In other words, if displayed in a darkened bar where it would be seen by no one but grown-up drinkers, the picture was held to be salacious and corrupting. But if placed in a public forum where anyone of any age could view it, it could be regarded as a local treasure.
I bring this up here to make the point that America's attitudes towards questions of public and private morality have long been a trifle confused.
[Chapter 18, Sex and Other Distractions, p. 359]
The Puritan age was, to be sure, one in which even the smallest of transgressions - or even sometimes no transgressions at all - could be met with the severest of penalties. Adultery, illegitimacy and masturbation were all at times capital offences in New England. [...]
[...] When a one-eyed pig was born in [New Haven], the magistrates cast around for an explanation and lighted on the hapless [George] Spencer, who also had but one eye. Questioned as to the possibility of bestiality, the frightened Spencer confessed, but then recanted. Under Connecticut law to convince Spencer of bestiality required the testimony of two witnesses. So keen were the magistrates to hand him that they admitted the pig as one witness and his retracted confession as another. [Bryson's source: David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, OUP, 1989, p. 92]
[Chapter 18, Sex and Other Distractions, p. 360]
[...] It was not enough in America to merely avoid mentioning an object. A word had to be found that would not even hint at its actual function. Unable to bring themselves to say chamber-pot or even commode, Americans began to refer to the vessel as a looking glass, with obvious scope for confusion [...]
[... Francis Trollope] discussed how a rakish young man tried to tease from a seamstress the name of the article of attire she was working on. Blushing hotly, the young lady announced that it was a frock, but when the young man pointed out that there wasn't nearly enough material for a frock she asserted it was an apron. Pressed further, she claimed it was a pillowcase. Eventually, she fled the room in shame and tears, unable to name the object. It was in fact a blouse, but to have uttered the word to a man would have been "a symptom of absolute depravity".
For women in particular, this rhetorical fastidiousness was not just absurd but dangerous. For much of the nineteenth century, ankles denoted the whole of a woman's body below the waist, while stomach did similar service for everything between the waist and head. It thus became impossible to inform a doctor of almost any serious medical complaint.
[Chapter 18, Sex and Other Distractions, p. 364]
If by some miracle a woman managed to acquire a little learning, she was not expected to share it with the world. [...] When in 1828 Fannie Wright gave a series of public lectures, the nation's press was at first shocked and then outraged. A newspaper in Louisville accused her of committing "an act against nature". The New York Free Enquirer declared that she had "with ruthless violence broken loose from the restraints of decorum". The New York American decided that she had "ceased to be a woman" by her actions. [Bryson's source: Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America, 1990, p. 162] No one objected to the content of the lectures, you understand, merely that it was issuing from the mouth of a female.
[Chapter 18, Sex and Other Distractions, p. 367]
[...] Most states have laws against fornication and even masturbation lying somewhere on their books, though you would hardly know it, such is the evasive language with which the laws are phrased. One of the most popular phrases is "crime against nature" (though in California it is "the infamous crime against nature" and in Indiana "the abominable and detestable crime against nature"), but almost never to they specify what a crime against nature is. An innocent observer could be excused for concluding that it means chopping down trees or walking on the grass.
[Chapter 18, Sex and Other Distractions, p. 373]
The difficulty of course is that acceptable behaviour, not just in sex but in all things, is a constantly changing concept. Just consider the matter of beards. In 1840, Americans had been beardless for so long - about two hundred years - that when an eccentric character in Framingham, Massachusetts, grew a beard he was attacked by a crowd and dragged off to jail. Yet by the mid-1850s, just a decade and a half later, there was scarcely a beardless man in America. From 1860 to 1897 every American president was bearded. Or consider hemlines. In 1921, when hemlines began to climb to mid-calf, Utah considered imprisoning - not fining, but imprisoning - women who wore skirts more than three inches above the ankle.
[Chapter 18, Sex and Other Distractions, p. 374]
[... The word] fucking appeared in a novel called Strange Fruit as early as 1945, and was banned in Massachusetts as a result. The publishers took the case to court, but the case fell apart when then defence attourney arguing for its sake was unable to bring himself to utter the objectionable word in court, in effect conceding that it was too filthy for public consumption. [Bryson's source: Morris L. Ernst & Alan U. Schwartz , Censorship: The Search for the Obscene, 1964, p. 95]
[Chapter 18, Sex and Other Distractions, p. 378]
That the most successful commercial aircraft in history should be named after a circus elephant is an obvious oddity. People are sometimes surprised to learn that Jumbo the elephant wasn't called that because he was big, but rather that big things are called jumbo because of him. [...]
Most Americans became familiar with Jumbo when P. T. Barnum, the circus impresario, bought the elephant from London Zoo in 1994, a scandal that outraged millions of Britons, and began exhibiting him all over America. [...]
[...] Jumbo's American career was unfortunately short-lived. One night in September 1885, after Jumbo had been on the road for only about a year, he was being led to his specially built boxcar after an evening performance in St. Thomas, Ontario, when an express train arrived unexpectedly and ploughed into him, with irreversible consequences to both elephant and train. It took 160 men to haul him of the track. Never one to miss a chance, Barnum had Jumbo's skin and bones separately mounted, and thereafter was able to exhibit the world's largest elephant to two audiences at once, without any of the costs of care or feeding. He made far more money out of Jumbo dead than alive.
[Chapter 19, The Road from Kittyhawk, p. 395-396]
Of necessity, most people in colonial America lived densely packed together in cities - in 1715 Borton's 15,000 inhabitants shared just 700 acres of land - and went almost everywhere on foot. Walking was such an unquestioned feature of everyday life that until 1791, when William Wordsworth coined the term pedestrian, there was no special word to describe someone on foot. [I would have thought walker -- Fred] (Interestingly, pedestrian in the sense of dull or unimaginative is significantly older, having been coined in 1716).
[Chapter 20, Welcome to the Space Age: The 1950s and Beyond, p. 406]
To qualify as an [edge city as defined in Joel Garreau's book Edge City], a community must have 5 million square feet of office space, 600,000 square feet of shopping, and more people working there than living there. America now has more than 200 edge cities. Los Angeles and New York have about two dozen each. Almost all have been created since 1960, and almost always they are soulless, impersonal places, unfocused collections of shopping malls and office complexes that are ruthlessly unsympathetic to non-motorists. Many have no pavements or pedestrian crossings, and only rarely do they offer any but the most skeletal public transport links to the nearby metropolis, effectively denying job opportunities to many of those left behind in the declining inner cities. About one third of all Americans now live in edge cities, and up to two-thirds of Americans work in them. [Bryson's source: Independent on Sunday, 15 November 1992, p. 8]
[Chapter 20, Welcome to the Space Age: The 1950s and Beyond, p. 408-409]

From Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There, Black Swan Books, 1998:

I quickly realised that everything about the bus [to Hammerfest] was designed for discomfort. [...] The seats were designed by a dwarf seeking revenge on full-sized people; there was no other explanation.
[...]
In the long, exciting weeks preceding the flight I had sustained myself, I confess, with a series of bedroom-ceiling fastasies that generally involved finding myself seated next to a panting young beauty being sent by her father against her wishes to the Lausanne Institute for Nymphomanical Disorders [...] In the event, my seatmate turned out to be an acned stringbean with [...] a line-up of plastic ball-point pens clipped to a protective plastic case in his shirt pocket. The plastic case said "Gruber's Tru-Valu Hardware, Flagellation, Oklahoma. If we don't got it, you don't need it", or something like that.
[Chapter 1, To the North, p. 11,13]
The driver [in Luxembourg] was very friendly. He spoke good English and shouted at me over the lawnmower roar of the engine that he worked as a travelling shoe salesman and his wife was a clerk in a Luxembourg bank and that they lived just over the border in Arlon. He kept turning round to rearrange things on the back seat to give me more space [...] at the same time he was driving with one hand at seventy miles an hour in heavy traffic.
Every few seconds his wife would shriek as the back of a lorry loomed up and filled the windscreen, and he would attend to the road for perhaps two and a half seconds before returning his attention to my comfort. [...]
I have seldom been more certain that I was about to die. The man drove as if we were in an arcade game. [...]
[Chapter 1, To the North, p. 16-17]
It was New Year's Eve [in Hammerfest], after all. But the bar was like a funeral parlour with a beverage service.
[Chapter 2, Hammerfest, p. 30]
There is only one [television] network in Norway and it is stupefyingly bad. It's not just that the programmes are dull, though in this respect they could win awards, but that the whole thing is so wondrously unpolished. Films finish and you get thirty seconds of scratchy white circles like you used to get when your home movies ran out and your dad didn't get to the projector fast enough, and then suddenly the lights come up on the day's host, looking faintly startled, as if he had been just about to do something that he wouldn't want the nation to see. [...] The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
[Chapter 2, Hammerfest, p. 32]
In my hotel in Oslo, where I spent four days after returning from Hammerfest, the chambermaid each morning left me a packet of something called Bio Tex Blå, a "minipakke for ferie, hybel og weekend", according to the instructions. I spent many happy hours sniffing it and experimenting with it, uncertain of whether it was for washing out clothes or gargling or cleaning the toilet bowl. In the end I dedided it was for washing out clothes - it worked a treat - but for all I know the rest of the weekend everywhere I went in Oslo people were saying to each other, "You know, that man smelled like toilet-bowl cleaner."
[Chapter 3, Oslo, p. 40]
I wanted to wander through Europe, to see movie posters for films that would never come to Britain, gaze wonderingly at hoardings and shop notices full of exotic umlauts and cedillas and No Parking-sign øs, hear pop songs that could not by even the most charitable stretch of the imagination be a hit in any country but their own, encounter people whose lives would never again intersect with mine, be hopelessly unfamiliar with everything, from the workings of a phone box to the identity of a foodstuff.
[Chapter 3, Oslo, p. 43-44]
The hotel was one of those sterile, modern places that always put me in mind of a BUPA advertisement, but at least it didn't have those curious timer switches that used to be a feature of hotel hallways in France. These were a revelation to me when I first arrived from America. All the light switches in the hallways were timed to switch off after ten or fifteen seconds, presumably as an economy measure. This wasn't so bad if your room was next to the elevator, but if it was very far down the hall, and hotel hallways in Paris tend to wander around like an old man with Alzheimer's, you would generally proceed the last furlong in total darkness, feeling your way along the walls with flattened palms, and invariably colliding scrotally with the corner of a nineteenth-century oak table put there, evidently, for that purpose. Occasionally your fingers would alight on something soft and hairy, which you would recognise after a moment as another person, and if he spoke English you could exchange tips.
You soon learned to have your key out and to sprint like billy-o for your room. But the trouble was that when eventually you re-emerged it was to total blackness once more and to a complete and - mark this - intentional absence of light switches, and there was nothing you could do but stumble about like Boris Karloff in The Mummy, and hope that you weren't about to blunder into a stairwell. From this I learned one very important lesson: the French do not like us.
That's OK, because of course nobody likes them much either. It so happens that I had just seen a survey in a British paper in which executives had been asked to list their most despised things in the whole universe and the top three ones were, in this order: garden gnomes, fuzzy dice hanging in car windows and the French. i just loved that. Of all the things to despise - pestilence, poverty, tyrannical governments, Michael Fish - they chose garden gnomes, fuzzy dice and the French. I think that's splendid.
[Chapter 4, Paris, p. 47-48]
By half-past eight Paris is a terrible place for walking. There's too much traffic. A blue haze of uncombusted diesel hangs over every boulevard. I know Baron Haussmann made Paris a grand place to look at, but the man had no concept of traffic flow. At the Arc de Triomphe alone thirteen roads come together. Can you imagine that? I mean to say, here you have a city with the world's most pathologically aggressive drivers - drivers who in other circumstances would be given injections of thorazine from syringes the size of bicycle pumps and confined to their beds with leather straps - and you give them an open space where they can all try to go in any of thirteen directions at once. Is that asking for trouble or what?
It's interesting to note that the French have had this reputation for bad driving since long before the invention of the internal combustion engine. Even in the eighteenth century British travellers to Paris were remarking on what lunatic drivers the French were, on "the astonishing speed with which the carriages and people moved through the streets ... It was not an uncommon sight to see a child run over and probably killed." I quote from The Grand Tour by Christopher Hibbert, a book whose great virtue is in pointing out that the peoples of Europe have for at least 300 years been living up to their stereotypes. [...]
[Chapter 4, Paris, p. 52]
The French were remarkably shameless about [jumping queues]. [...] In New York [...] the queue jumpers would have been seized by the crowd and had their limbs torn from their sockets. [...] Even in London the miscreants would have received a various rebuke - "I say, kindly take your place at the back of the queue, there's a good fellow" - but here there was not a peep of protest.
[Chapter 4, Paris, p. 54]
[...] I just hate the way architects and city planners and everyone else responsible for urban life seems to have lost sight of what cities are for. They are for people. That seems obvious enough, but for half a century we have been building cities that are for almost anything else: for cars, for businesses, for developers, for people with money and bold visions who refuse to see cities from ground level, as places in which people must live and function to get around. Why should I have to walk through a damp tunnel and negotiate two sets of stairs to get across a busy street? Why should cars be given priority over me? How can we be so rich and so stupid at the same time? It is the curse of our century - too much money, too little sense - and the Pompidou seems to me a kind of celebration of that in plastic.
[Chapter 4, Paris, p. 58]
I went to Bruges for a day. It's only thirty miles from Brussels and so beautiful, so deeply, endlessly gorgeous, that it's hard to believe it could be in the same country. Everything about it is perfect - its cobbled streets, its placid, bottle-green canals, its steep-roofed medieval houses, its market squares, its slumbering parks, everything. No city has been better favoured by decline. For 200 years Bruges - I don't know why we persist in calling it this because to the locals it's spelled Brugge and pronounced "Brooguh" - was the most prosperous city in Europe, but the silting up of the River Zwyn and changing political circumstances made it literally a backwater, and for 500 years, while other cities grew and were endlessly transformed, Bruges remained forgotten and untouched. When Wordsworth visited in the nineteenth century he found grass growing in the streets. Antwerp, I've been told, was more beautiful still, even as late as the turn of this century, but developers moved in and pulled down everything they could get their hands on, which was pretty much everything. Bruges was saved by its obscurity.
It is a rare place. I walked for a day with my mouth open. [...] I [...] never once saw a street that I wouldn't want to live on, a pub that I wouldn't like to get to know, a view I wouldn't wish to call my own. It was hard to accept that it was real - that people came home to these houses every night and shopped in these shops and went through life thinking that this is the way of the world. They must go into shock when they first see Brussels.
An insurance claims adjuster I got talking to in a bar on St Jacobstraat told me sadly that Bruges had become insufferable for eight months of the year because of the tourists [...]
[Chapter 6 - Belgium, p. 72-73]
The brochures [in the town of Spa] were all for places with non-nonsense names like The Professor Henrijean Hydrology Institute and The Spa Therm Institution's Department of Radiology and Gastro-Enterology. Between them they offered a bewildering array of treatments that ran from immersion in 'natural carbogazeous baths' and slathering in hot and gooey mudpacks, to being connected to a free-standing electrical sub-station and briskly electrocuted, or so it looked from the photograph. These treatments were guaranteed to do a number of things I didn't realize it was desirable to do - "dilate the dermal vessels", "further the repose of the thermoregulatory centres" and "ease periarticular contractures", to name but three.
I decided without hesistation that my thermoregulatory centres were reposed enough, if not actually deceased, and although I do have the occasional periarticular contracture and pitch forward into my spaghetti, I decided I could live with this after seeing what the muscular, white-coated ladies of the Spa institutes do to you if they detect so much as a twinge in your particulars or suspect any backsliding among the dermals. The photographs showed a frankly worried-looking female patient being variously covered in tar, blown around a shower stall with a high-pressure hose, forced to recline in bubbling copper vats and otherwise subjected to a regimen that in other circumstances would bring ineluctably to mind the expression "war crimes". [...]
[Chapter 6 - Belgium, p. 75]
It wouldn't bother me in the least (and I realise I am sounding dangerously like Bernard Levin here, which God forbid) if all the dogs in the world were placed in a sack and taken to some distant island - Greenland springs attractively to mind - where they could romp around and sniff each other's anuses to their hearts' content and never bother or terrorize me again. The only kind of dog I would excuse from this round-up is the poodle. Poodles I would shoot.
I don't like most animals, to tell you the truth. Even goldfish daunt me. Their whole existence seems a kind of reproach. "What's it all about?" they seem to be saying. "I swim here, I swim there. What for?" I can't look at a goldfish for more than ten seconds without feeling like killing myself, or at least reading a French novel.
[Chapter 6 - Belgium, p. 79]
It should have been written into the armistice treaty at the end of the [second world] war that the Germans would be required to lay down their accordians along with their arms.
[Chapter 7 - Aachen and Cologne, p. 88]
[...] My waitress spoke no English at all and I had the most extraordinary difficulty getting myself understood. I asked for a beer and she looked at me askance.
"Wass? Tier?"
"Nein, beer," I said, and her puzzlement grew.
"Fear? Steer? Queer? King Leer?"
"Nein, nein, beer." I pointed at the menu.
"Ah, beer," she said, with a private tut, as if I had been intentionally misleading her. I felt abashed for not speaking German, but comforted myself with the thought that if I did understand the language I would know what the pompous man at the next table was boasting about to his wife (or possibly mistress) and then I would be as bored as she clearly was. She was [...] looking with undisguised interest at all the men in the room, except of course me (I am invisible to everyone but dogs and Jehovah's Wistnesses.) Her companion didn't notice this. He was too busy telling her how he had just sold a truckload of hoola hoops and Leo Sayer albums to the East Germans, and basking in his cunning.
[Chapter 7 - Aachen and Cologne, p. 89]
The lakeside [in Hamburg] is agreeably lined with trees and benches, overlooked by office buildings and a couple of hotels of the old school, the sort of places where the doormen are dressed like Albanian admirals and rich old ladies in furs constantly go in and out with little dogs under their arms.
[Chapter 9 - Hamburg, p. 117]
I had a hangover you could sell to science, but after two cups of strong coffee at a sunny table outside the Popp, a handful of aspirins, two cigarettes and a cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm, I felt tolerably human and was able to undertake a gentle stroll to the waterfront through the dappled sunshine of St Pauli Park.
[Chapter 9 - Hamburg, p. 118]
The whole length of Nyhavn was lined with outdoor tables, with young, blond, gorgeous people drinking, eating and enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. I always wonder in Copenhagen what they do with their old people - they must put them in cellars or send them to Arizona - because everyone, without exception, is youthful, fresh-scrubbed, healthy, blond and immensely good-looking. You could cast a Pepsi commercial in Copenhagen in fifteen seconds. And they all look so happy.
[Chapter 10 - Copenhagen, p. 131]
National museums, especially in small countries, are often feeble affairs [...] But the Danish National Museum is both vast and richly endowed [...]
Some museums have great treasures but are dull buildings and some have dull treasures but are great buildings, but the [Ny Carlsberg] Glypotek succeeds on both counts. It has an outstanding collection of Roman statuary and some of the finest Impressionist paintings to be seen anywhere, but the building itself is a joy - light, airy, impeccably decorated, with a warm and tranquil palm court full of gently dozing old people. (So that's where they put them!)
But the best museum I saved for last - the Hirschsprung Collection in Østre Anlaeg Park. Everything about it is wonderful. It's a pleasant and gentle stroll from the city centre and Østre Anlaeg is the best park in the city, in my experience (which is short but in this case attentive), for seeing secretaries sunning their breasts, but even without these huge and novel inducements it is worth seeking out because it is such a terrific and little-visited museum. It contains 884 paintings, assembled over forty years by one man, almost all of them from the nineteenth-century Skagen school of Danish painting, and all packed densely into twenty or so small rooms. The paintings are all concerned with simple themes - summer landscapes, friends enjoying a casual dinner, a view of the sea from an open window, a woman at a sink - but the effect is simply enchanting, and you come away feeling as if you have spent the afternoon in some kind of marvellous and refreshing ionizer.
[Chapter 10 - Copenhagen, p. 135-136]
[A map of] Denmark looks like a plate that has been dropped onto a hard floor: it is fractured into a thousand pieces, forming deep bays and scorpion-tail peninsulas and seas within seas. The villages and towns sounded inviting - Aerösköbing, Skaerbaek, Holsenbro, the intriguingly specific Middlefart [...]
[Chapter 11 - Gothenburg, p. 142]
[A bistro in Stockholm called Matpalatset] was friendly and crowded and wonderfully warm and snug, but the food was the worst I have ever had outside a hospital cafeteria - a grey salad with water cucumber and mushrooms that tasted of old newspaper, and a lasagne that was not so much cooked as scorched. Each time I poked it with my knife and fork, the lasagne recoiled as if I were tormenting it. I was quietly agog. Nowhere else in Europe could a place serve food this bad and stay in business, and yet people were queuing at the door. I ate it all because I was hungry and because it was costing me as much as a weekend in Brighton, but seldom have I felt more as if I were engaged in a simple refuelling exercise.
[Chapter 12 - Stockholm, p. 153-154]
[...] wandered up to the lofty heights of the Gianicolo, where the views across the city were sensational and where young couples entwined themselves in steamy embraces on the narrow ledges. The Italians appear to have devised a way of having sex without taking their clothes off and they were going at it hammer and tongs up here. I had an ice-cream and watched to see how many of them tumbled over the edge to dash themselves on the rocks below, but none did, thank goodness. They must wear suction cups on their backs.
For a week, I just walked and walked. [...] And when I tired I sat with a coffee or sunned myself on a bench, until I was ready to walk again.
Having said this, Rome is not an especially good city for walking. For one thing, there is the constant danger that you will be run over. Zebra crossings count for nothing in Rome, which is not unexpected but takes some getting used to. It is a shock to be strolling across some expansive boulevard, lost in an idle fantasy involving Ornella Muti and a vat of Jell-O, when suddenly it dawns on you that the six lanes of cars bearing down on you have no intention of stopping.
It isn't that they want to hit you, as they do in Paris, but they just will hit you. This is partly because Italian drivers pay no attention to anything happening on the road ahead of them. They are too busy tooting their horns, gesticulating wildly, preventing other vehicles from cutting into their lane, making love, smacking the children in the back seat and eating a sandwich the size of a baseball bat, often all at once. So the first time they are likely to notice you is in the rear-view mirror as something lying on the road behind them.
Even if they do see you, they won't stop. There is nothing personal in this. It's just that if something is in the way they must move it, whether it is a telephone pole or a visitor from the Middle West. The only exception to this is nuns. Even Roman drivers won't hit a nun - you see groups of them breezing across eight-lane arteries with the most amazing impunity, like scraps of black and white paper borne along by the wind - so if you wish to cross some busy place like the Piazza Venezia your only hope is to wait for some nuns to come along and stick to them like a sweaty T-shirt.
I love the way Italians park. You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as though you've just missed a parking competition for blind people. [...] Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap. [...]
Italians will park anywhere. All over the city you will see them bullying their cars into spaces about the size of a sofa cushion, holding up traffic and prompting every driver within three miles to lean on his horn and give a passable imitation of a man in an electric chair. If the opening is too small for a car, Italians will decorate it with litter [...]
Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive. They don't queue, they don't pay their taxes, they don't turn up for appointments on time, they don't undertake any sort of labour without a small bribe, they don't believe in rules at all. [...]
At the time of my visit, the Italians were working their way through their forty-eighth government in forty-five years. The country has the social structure of a banana republic, yet the amazing thing is that it thrives.
[Chapter 13 - Rome, p. 164-167]
[...] Eighty per cent of all the art thefts in Europe take place in Italy.
This casual attitude to the national heritage is something of a tradition in Rome. For a thousand years, usually with the blessings of the Roman Catholic Church (which had a share in the profits and a lot to answer for generally, if you ask me), builders and architects looked upon the city's ancient baths, temples and other timeless monuments as quarries. The Colosseum isn't the hulking ruin it is today because of the ravages of time, but because for hundreds of years people knocked chunks from it with sledgehammers and carted them off to nearby lime kilns to turn into cement. [...] It is a wonder that any of ancient Rome survives at all.
[Chapter 13 - Rome, p. 169]
St Peter's doesn't look all that fabulous from the outside, not at least from the piazza at its foot, but step inside and its so sensational that your mouth falls open whether you want it to or not. It is a marvel, so vast and beautiful and cool and filled with treasures and airy heights and pale beams of heavenly light that you don't know where to place your gaze. It is the only building I have ever been in where I have felt like sinking to my knees, clasping my hands heavenward and crying, "Take me home, Lord." No structure on earth would ever look the same to me again.
[Chapter 13 - Rome, p. 171-172]
On my final morning I called at the Capuchin monks' mausoleum in the church of Santa Maria della Concezione on the busy Piaza Barberini. This I cannot recommend highly enough. In the sixteenth century some monk had the inspired idea of taking the bones of his fellow monks when they died and using them to decorate the place. Is that rich enough for you? Half a dozen gloomy chambers along one side of the church were filled with such attractions as an altar made of rib cages, shrines meticulously concocted from skulls and leg bones, ceilings trimmed with forearms, wall rosettes fashioned form vertebrae, chandeliers made from the bones of hands and feet. In the odd corner there stood a complete skeleton of a Capuchin monk dressed like the Grim Reaper in his hooded robe, and ranged along the other wall were signs in six languages with such cheery sentiments as "We were like you. You will be like us", and a long poem engagingly called "My Mother Killed Me!!". [...]
Four thousand monks contributed to the display between 1528 and 1870 when the practice was stopped for being just too tacky for words. No one knows quite why or by whom the designs were made, but the inescapable impression you are left with is that the Capuchins once harboured in their midst a half-mad monk with time on his hands and a certain passion for tidiness. [...]
[Chapter 13 - Rome, p. 173-174]
I checked out of my hotel and walked to Roma-Termini. It was, in the way of most public place in Italy, a madhouse. At every ticket window customers were gesturing wildly. They didn't seem so much to be buying their tickets as pouring out their troubles to the monumentally indifferent and weary-looking men seated behind each window. It is amazing how much emotion the Italians invest in even the simplest of transactions.
I had to wait in line for forty minutes while a series of people ahead of me tore their hair and bellowed and were eventually issued with a ticket and came away looking suddenly happy. [..] You need a pickaxe to keep your place in a Roman queue.
Finally, about a minute to spare before my train left, my turn came. I bought a second-class ticket to Naples - it was easy; I don't know what all the fuss was about - then raced around the corner to the platform and did something I've always longed to do: I jumped onto a moving train - or, to be slightly more precise, fell into it, like a mailbag tossed from the platform.
[Chapter 14 - Naples, Sorrento and Capri, p. 175]
The citizens of Pozzuoli [a suburb of Naples] enjoy the dubious distinction of living on the most geologically unstable piece of land on the planet, the terrestrial equivalent of a Vibro-Bed. They experience up to 4,000 earth tremors a year, sometimes as many as a hundred in a day. People in Pozzuoli are so used to having pieces of plaster fall into their ragù and tumbling chimney blocks knock off their grannies that they hardly notice it any more.
[Chapter 14 - Naples, Sorrento and Capri, p. 181-182]
Capri town was gorgeous, an infinitely charming little place of villas and tiny lemon groves and long views across the bay to Naples and Vesuvius. The heart of the town was a small square, the Piazza Umberto I, lined with cream-coloured buildings and filled with tables and wicker chairs from the cafés ranged around it. At one end, up some wide steps, stood an old church, dignified and white, and at the other was a railinged terrace with an open view to the sea far below.
I cannot recall a more beguiling place for walking. The town consisted almost entirely of a complex network of white-walled lanes and passageways, many of them barely wider than your shoulders, and all of them interconnected in a wonderfully bewildering fashion, so that I would constantly find myself returning unexpectedly to a spot I had departed from in an opposing direction ten minutes before. Every few yards an iron gate would be set on the wall and through it I could glimpse a white cottage in a jungle of flowery shrubs and, usually, a quarry-tiled terrace overlooking the sea. Every few yards a cross-passageway would plunge off down the hillside or a set of steps would climb half-way to the clouds to a scattering of villas high above. I wanted every house I saw.
There were no roads at all, apart from the one leading from the harbour to the town and onward to Anacapri, on the far side of the island. Everywhere else had to be got to on foot, often after an arduous trek. Capri must be the worst place in the world to be a washing-machine delivery man.
Most of the shops lay beyond the church, up the steps from the central piazza, in yet another series of lanes and little squares of unutterable charm. They all had names like Gucci and Yves St Laurent, which suggested that the summertime habitués must be rich and insufferable, but mercifully most of the shops were not open and there was no sign of the yachting-capped assholes and bejewelled crinkly women who must make them prosper in the summer.
[...] The path meandered and climbed, so much so that I grew breathless again and propelled myself onwards by pushing my hands against my knees, but the scenery and setting were so fabulous that I was dragged on, as if by magnets. Near the top of the hillside the path levelled out and ran through a grove of pine trees, heaving with the smell of rising sap. On one side of the path were grand villas - I couldn't imagine by what method they got the furniture there when people moved in or out - and on the other was a giddying view of the island: white villas strewn across the hillsides, half buried in hibiscus and bougainvillea and a hundred other types of shrub.
It was nearly dusk. A couple of hundred yards further on the path rounded a bend through the trees and ended suddenly, breathtakingly, in a viewing platform hanging out over a precipice of rock - a little patio in the sky. It was a look-out built for the public, but I had the feeling that no one had been there for years, certainly no tourist. It was the sheerest stroke of luck that I had stumbled upon it. I have never seen anything half as beautiful: on one side the town of Capri spilling down the hillside, on the other the twinkling lights of the cove at Anacapri and the houses gathered around it, and in front of me a sheer drop of - what? - 200 feet, 300 feet, to a sea of the lushest aquamarine washing against outcrops of jagged rock. The sea was so far below that the sound of breaking waves reached me as the faintest of whispers. A sliver of moon, brilliantly white, hung in a pale blue evening sky, a warm breeze teased my hair and everywhere there was the smell of lemon, honeysuckle and pine. It was like being in the household-products section of Sainsbury's. Ahead of me there was nothing but open sea, calm and seductive, for 150 miles to Sicily. [...]
[Chapter 14 - Naples, Sorrento and Capri, p. 185-187]
I went on the world's slowest train to Florence. It limped across the landscape like a runner with a pulled muscle, and it had no buffet. [...] Every two or three miles the train stopped at some darkened station where no train had stopped for weeks, where grass grew on the platforms and where no one got on and no one got off.
Sometimes the train would come to a halt in the middle of nowhere, in the black countryside, and just sit. It would sit for so long that you began to wonder if the driver had gone off into the surrounding fields for a pee and fallen down a well. After a time the train would roll backwards for perhaps thirty yards, then stop and sit again. Then suddenly, with a mighty whomp that made the carriage rock and the windows sound as if they were about to implode, a train on the parallel line would fly past. Bright lights would flash by - you could see people in there dining and playing cards, having a wonderful time, moving across Europe at the speed of a laser - and then all would be silence again and we would sit for another eternity before our train gathered the energy to creep onwards to the next desolate station.
[Chapter 15 - Florence, p. 193-194]
Still the [hotel] elevator didn't come. I decided to take the fire stairs. I bounded down them two at a time, the whole of my existence dedicated to the idea of a beer and a sandwich, and at the bottom found a padlocked door and a sign in Italian that said "If there is ever a fire here, this is where the bodies will pile up".
[Chapter 15 - Florence, p. 193-194]
Afterwards I crossed the cathedral square [in Milan] to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele and spent a happy hour wandering through it, hands behind my back, browsing in the windows and noting with unease the occasional splats from the pigeons that had made their way in and were now leading a rewarding life gliding amongst the rafters and shitting on the people below. It is an imposing shopping arcade, four stories high, built in the grandiose style of the 1860s and still probably the most handsome shopping mall in the world, with floors of neatly patterned tiles, a vaulted latticework root of glass and steel, and a cupola rising 160 feet about a rotunda where the two interior avenues intersect. It has the loftiness and echoing hush, and even the shape, of a cathedral, but with something of the commercial grandness of a nineteenth-century railway station thrown in. Every shopping centre should be like this.
[Chapter 16 - Milan and Como, p. 210]
One man liked [the painting] so much that he had brought his own folding chair and was just sitting there with arms crossed looking at it. The best thing about the Brera [Gallery] was that there was hardly anyone there, just a few locals and no foreign tourists but me. After Florence, it was bliss to be able to see the paintings would having to ask someone to lift me up.
[Chapter 16 - Milan and Como, p. 213]
[...] I remember reading that Lake Como was where Mussolini was found hiding out after Italy fell, and I figured it must have something going for it if it was the last refuge of a desperate man.
It did. It was a lovely little city, clean and perfect, in a cupped hand of Alpine mountains at the southern end of the narrow, thirty-mile-long lake of the same name. It is only a small place, but it boasts two cathedrals, two railway stations (each with its own line to Milan), two grand villas, a fetching park, a lakeside promenade overhung with poplars and generously adorned with green wooden benches, and a maze of ancient pedestrian-only streets filled with little shops and secret squares. It was perfect, perfect.
[Chapter 16 - Milan and Como, p. 215]
They don't seem to eat sandwiches in Locarno. I walked all around the business district and had trouble finding even a bakery. When at last I did find one it seemed to sell nothing but gooey pastries, though they did have a pile of what I took to be sausage rolls. Starving, I ordered three, at considerable expense, and went outside with them. But they turned out to contain mashed figs - a foodstuff that only your grandmother would eat, and only then because she couldn't find her dentures - and tasted like tea leaves soaked in cough syrup. I gamely nibbled away at one of them, but it was too awful and I put them in my rucksack with the idea that I might try them again later. In the event I forgot about them and didn't rediscover them until two days later when I pulled my last clean shirt from the rucksack and found the rolls clinging to it.
[Chapter 16 - Milan and Como, p. 217]
Locarno, I decided, was a strange place. I bought a ticket on the two o'clock train to Domodossala, a name that can be pronounced in thirty-seven ways. The man in the ticket window made me try out all of them [...]
I waited and waited on the platform, but the train never came and it seemed off that no one else was waiting with me. There were only a couple of trains a day to Domodossala. Surely there would be at least one or two other passengers? Finally, I went and asked a porter and he indicated to me [...] that I had to take a bus and, when pressed as to where I might find this bus, motioned vaguely with the back of his hand in the direction of the rest of the world. I went outside just in time to see the bus for Domodossala pulling out. Fortunately, I was able to persuade the driver to stop by clinging to the windscreen for two hundred yards. I was desperate to get out of there.
[Chapter 16 - Milan and Como, p. 218-219]
I examined six or seven restaurants, mystified by the menus, wishing I knew the German for liver, pig's trotters and boiled eyeball, before chancing upon an establishment called the Restaurant de la Place at the top of the town. Now this is a nice surprise, I thought, and went straight in, figuring I'd have some idea what I was ordering, but the name [...] was a heartless joke. The menu here was in German, too.
It really is the most unattractive language for foodstuffs. If you want whipped cream in your coffee in much of the German-speaking world, you order it "mit schlag". Now, does that sound to you like a frothy and delicious pick-me-up, or does that sound like the sort of thing smokers bring up first thing in the morning? Here the menu was full of items that brought to mind the noises of a rutting pig: Knoblauchbrot, Schweinskotelett ihrer Wahl, Portion Schlagobers (and that was a dessert).
[Chapter 17 - Switzerland, p. 221-222]
[...] I noticed on my map that just up the road was the Mus&ecaute;e International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Breakfast Roll) [...]
[Chapter 17 - Switzerland, p. 231]
[...] Bern has the air of a busy provincial market town. You would never guess that it is a national capital. This is partly because of the nature of Swiss politics. So many powers are devolved to the cantons and to national referenda that Switzerland doesn't even feel the need to have a prime minister, and the presidency is a such a nominal and ceremonial position that it changes hands every year. They wouldn't have a president at all except that they need somebody to greet visiting heads of state at the airport.
[Chapter 17 - Switzerland, p. 234]
You know when you are entering the German-speaking part of Switzerland because all the towns have names that sound like someone talking with his mouth full of bread: Thun, Leuk, Plaffein, Flims, Gstaad, Pfäffikon, Linthal, Thusis, Fluelen, Thalwil.
[Chapter 18 - Liechtenstein, p. 238]
The people of McDonald's need guidance. They need to be told that Europe is not Disneyland. They need to be instructed to take suitable premises on a side street and given, without option, a shop design that is recognizable, appropriate to its function and yet reasonably subdued. It should look like a normal European bistro, with perhaps little red curtains and a decorative aquarium and nothing to tell you from the outside that this is a McDonald's except for a discrete golden-arches transfer on each window and steady stream of people with enormous asses going in and out of the door. While we're at it, they should be told that they will no longer be allowed to provide each customer with his own weight in styrofoam boxes and waste paper. And finally they have to promise to shoot Ronald. When these conditions are met, McDonald's should be allowed to operate in Europe, but not until.
[Chapter 19 - Austria, p. 253]
The bus was crowded - buses in Yugoslavia always are - but I found a seat three-quarters of the way back and gripped the seat bar in front of me with both hands. When Katz and I had crossed Yugoslavia, it had been nothing if not exciting. The roads through the mountains were perilous beyond words, much too narrow for a bus, full of impossible bends and sheer falls from unimaginable heights. Our driver was an escaped lunatic who had somehow talked his way into a job with the bus company. Young and handsome, wearing his cap at a rakish angle, he drove as if cheerfully possessed, passing on blind bends, driving at break-neck speed, honking at everything, slowing for nothing. He sang hearty tunes and carried on lively conversations with the passengers - often turning around in his seat to address them directly - while simultaneously sweeping us along the edge of ragged roads on the brink of sheer-side cliffs. I remember pressing my face to the window many times and being able to see no road beneath us - just a straight drop and the sort of views you get from an aeroplane. There was never more than an inch of shoulder standing between us and wingless flight.
[...] I was looking forward to the dangers of the mountain road - it was such an exhilarating combination of terror and excitement, like having a heart attack and enjoying it. The bus laboured through the streets of Split and up into the steep, cement-coloured mountains at its back. I was disappointed to discover that the roads had been improved in my long absence [...] and that the driver was not obviously psychotic. He drove with both hands and kept his eyes on the road.
[Chapter 20 - Yugoslavia, p. 276-277]

From Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent, Secker & Warburg, 1990:

In Britain it had been a year without summer. Wet spring had merged imperceptibly into bleak autumn. For months the sky had remained a depthless gray. Sometimes it rained, but mostly it was just dull, a land without shadows. It was like living inside Tupperware.
[Chapter 2, p. 13]
When we arrived, my grandmother would scuttle off to pull something fresh-baked out of the oven. This was always something unusual. My grandmother was the only person I ever knew-possibly the only person who ever lived-who actually made things from the recipes on the backs of food packets. These dishes always had names like Rice Krispies 'n' Banana Chunks Upside Down Cake or Del Monte Lima Bean 'n' Pretzels Party Snacks. Generally they consisted of suspiciously large amounts of the manufacturer's own products, usually in combinations you wouldn't think of except perhaps in an especially severe famine. The one thing to be said for these dishes was that they were novel. When my grandmother offered you a steaming slab of cake or wedge of pie it might contain almost anything -- Niblets sweet corn, chocolate chips, Spam, diced carrots, peanut butter. Generally it would have some Rice Krispies in it somewhere. My grandmother was particularly partial to Rice Krispies and would add a couple of shovelfuls to whatever she made, even if the recipe didn't call for it. She was about as bad a cook as you can be without actually being hazardous.
[Chapter 2, p. 18]
[...] I went into my room with my bag and had a look around, as you do in a new place. There was a black-and-white TV, which appeared to get only one channel, and three bent coat hangers. The bathroom mirror was cracked, and the shower curtains didn't match. The toilet seat had a strip of paper across it saying "Sanitized For Your Protection", but floating beneath it was a cigarette butt, adrift in a little circle of nicotine. Dad would have liked it here, I thought.
I had a shower -- that is to say, water dribbled onto my head from a nozzle in the wall -- and afterwards went out to check out the town. I had a meal of gristle and baked whiffle ball at a place called, aptly, Chuck's. I didn't think it was possible to get a truly bad meal anywhere in the Midwest, but Chuck managed to provide it. It was the worst food I had ever had -- and remember, I've lived in England. It had all the attributes of chewing gum, except flavor. Even now when I burp I can taste it.
[Chapter 3, p. 26]
In a forlorn effort to keep from losing my mind, I switched on the radio, but then I remembered that American radio is designed for people who have already lost their minds. [...] I twirled the dial. A voice said, "We'll return to our discussion of maleness in sixty seconds." I twirled the dial. The warbling voice of a female country singer intoned:
His hands are tiny
His legs are short
But I lean upon him
For my child support.
[Chapter 4, p. 40]
[...] Signs came and went: TEE PEE MINI MART, B-RITE FOOD STORE, BETTY'S BEAUTY Box, SAV-A-LOT FOOD CENTER, PINCKNEYVILLE COON CLUB, BALD KNOB TRAILER COURT, DAIRY DELITE, ALL U CAN EAT. In between these shrines to dyslexia and free enterprise there were clearings on the hillsides where farmhouses stood. [...]
[Chapter 4, p. 41]
It used to be that when you came to the outskirts of a town you would find a gas station and a Dairy Queen, maybe a motel or two if it was a busy road or the town had a college. Now every town, even a quite modest one, has a mile or more of fast-food places, motor inns, discount cities, shopping malls - all with thirty-foot-high revolving signs and parking lots the size of Shropshire. Carbondale appeared to have nothing else. I drove in on a road that became a two-mile strip of shopping centers and gas stations, K-Marts, J. C. Penneys, Hardees and McDonald's. And then, abruptly, I was in the country again. I turned around and drove back through town on a parallel street that offered precisely the same sort of things but in slightly different configurations and then I was in the country again. The town had no center. It had been eaten by shopping malls.
I got a room in the Heritage Motor Inn, then went out for a walk to try once more to find Carbondale. But there really was nothing there. [...] here was no square to stroll to, no Betty's, no blue-plate specials, no Vern's Midnite Tavern, no movie theater, no bowling alley. There was no town, just six-lane highways and shopping malls. There weren't even any sidewalks. Going for a walk, as I discovered, was a ridiculous and impossible undertaking. I had to cross parking lots and gas station forecourts, and I kept coming up against little white-painted walls marking the boundaries between, say, Long John Silver's Seafood Shoppe and Kentucky Fried Chicken. To get from one to the other, it was necessary to clamber over the wall, scramble up a grassy embankment and pick your way through a thicket of parked cars. That is if you were on foot. But clearly from the looks people gave me as I lumbered breathlessly over the embankment, no one had ever tried to go from one of these places to another under his own motive power. What you were supposed to do was get in your car, drive twelve feet down the street to another parking lot, park the car and get out. [...]
[Chapter 4, p. 41-42]
I looked at the other magazines. There were at least zoo of them, but they all had titles like Machine-Gun Collector, Obese Bride, Christian Woodworker, Home Surgery Digest. There was nothing for a normal person, so I left.
[Chapter 6, p. 56]
I could live here, I thought. But then the waitress came over and said, "Yew honestly a breast menu, honey?" and I realized that it was out of the question. I couldn't understand a word these people said to me. She might as well have addressed me in Dutch. It took many moments and much gesturing with a knife and fork to establish that what she had said to me was "Do you want to see a breakfast menu, honey?" [...]
[Chapter 7, p. 62]
[...] I passed through a little town called Pine Mountain, which seemed to have everything you could want in an inland resort. It was attractive and had nice shops. The only thing it lacked was a mountain, which was a bit of a disappointment considering its name. I had intentionally chosen this route because Pine Mountain conjured up to my simple mind a vision of clean air, craggy precipices, scented forests and tumbling streams [...] Still, who could blame the locals if they stretched the truth a little in the pursuit of a dollar? You could hardly expect people to drive miles out of their way to visit something called Pine Flat-Place.
[...] From Warm Springs I went some miles out of my way to take the scenic road into Macon, but there didn't seem to be a whole lot scenic about it. It wasn't unscenic particularly, it just wasn't scenic. I was beginning to suspect that the scenic route designations on my maps had been applied somewhat at random. I imagined some guy who had never been south of Jersey City sitting in an office in New York and saying, "Warm Springs to Macon? Oooh, that sounds nice," and then carefully drawing in the orange dotted line that signifies a scenic route, his tongue sticking ever so slightly out of the corner of his mouth.
[Chapter 8, p. 67,70]
I stood agog in Lafayette Square in Savannah, amid brick paths, trickling fountains and dark trees hung with Spanish moss. Before me rose up a cathedral of exquisite linen-fresh whiteness with twin Gothic spires, and around it stood zoo-year-old houses of weathered brick, with hurricane shutters that clearly were still used. I did not know that such perfection existed in America. There are twenty such squares in Savannah, cool and quiet beneath a canopy of trees, and long straight side streets equally dark and serene. It is only when you stumble out of this urban rain forest, out into the open streets of the modern city, exposed to the glare of the boiling sun, that you realize just how sweltering the South can be. This was October, a time of flannel shirts and hot toddies in Iowa, but here summer was unrelenting. It was only eight in the morning and already businessmen were loosening their ties and mopping their foreheads. What must it be like in August? Every store and restaurant is air-conditioned. You step inside and the sweat is freeze-dried on your arms. Step back outside and the air meets you as something hot and unpleasant, like a dog's breath. It is only in Savannah's squares that the climate achieves a kind of pleasing equilibrium.
Savannah is a seductive city and I found myself wandering almost involuntarily for hours. The city has more than 1,000 historic buildings, many of them still lived in as houses. This was, New York apart, the first American city I had ever been in where people actually lived downtown. What a difference it makes, how much more vibrant and alive it all seems, to see children playing ball in the street or skipping rope on the front stoops. [...]
[Chapter 8, p. 70-71]
[...] You are always reading how buoyant the movie industry is in America, but all the theaters now are at shopping malls in the suburbs. You go to the movies there and you get a choice of a dozen pictures, but each theater is about the size of a large fridge-freezer and only marginally more comfortable. There are no balconies. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine movie theaters without balconies? To me going to the movies means sitting in the front row of the balcony with your feet up, dropping empty candy boxes onto the people below (or, during the more boring love scenes, dribbling Coke) and throwing Nibs at the screen. Nibs were a licorice-flavored candy, thought to be made from rubber left over from the Korean War, which had a strange popularity in the 1950s. They were practically inedible, but if you sucked on one of them for a minute and then threw it at the screen, it would stick with an interesting pock sound. It was a tradition on Saturdays for everybody to take the bus downtown to the Orpheum, buy a box of Nibs and spend the afternoon bombarding the screen.
You had to be careful when you did this because the theater manager employed vicious usherettes, dropouts from Tech High School whose one regret in life was that they hadn't been born into Hitler's Germany, who patrolled the aisles with highpowered flashlights looking for children who were misbehaving. Two or three times during the film their darting lights would fix on some hapless youngster, half out of his seat, poised in throwing position with a moistened Nib in his hand, and they would rush to subdue him. He would be carried off squealing. This never happened to my friends or me, thank God, but we always assumed that the victims were taken away and tortured with electrical instruments before being turned over to the police for a long period of mental readjustment in a reform school. Those were the days! You cannot tell me that some suburban multiplex with shoebox theaters and screens the size of bath towels can offer anything like the enchantment and community spirit of a cavernous downtown movie house. Nobody seems to have noticed it yet, but ours could well be the last generation for which moviegoing has anything like a sense of magic.
[Chapter 8, p. 72]
[...] I was gratified to note that almost everything had a Bryson City sign on it -- Bryson City Laundry, Bryson City Coal and Lumber, Bryson City Church of Christ, Bryson City Electronics, Bryson City Police Department, Bryson City Fire Department, Bryson City Post Office. I began to appreciate how George Washington might feel if he were to be brought back to life and set down in the District of Columbia. I don't know who the Bryson was whom this town was so signally honoring, but I had certainly never seen my name spread around so lavishly, and I regretted that I hadn't brought a crowbar and monkey wrench because many of the signs would have made splendid keepsakes. I particularly fancied having the Bryson City Church of Christ sign beside my front gate in England and being able to put up different messages every week like "Repent Now, Limeys."
[Chapter 9, p. 80-81]
All morning I had been troubled by a vague sense of something being missing, and then it occurred to me what it was. There were no hikers such as you would see in England -- no people in stout boots and short pants, with knee-high tasseled stockings. No little rucksacks full of sandwiches and flasks of tea. and baker's caps laboring breathlessly up the mountainsides, slowing up traffic. What slowed the traffic here were the massive motor homes lumbering up and down the mountain passes. Some of them, amazingly, had cars tethered to their rear bumpers, like dinghies. I got stuck behind one on the long, sinuous descent down the mountain into Tennessee. It was so wide that it could barely stay within its lane and kept threatening to nudge oncoming cars off into the picturesque void to our left. That, alas, is the way of vacationing nowadays for many people. The whole idea is not to expose yourself to a moment of discomfort or inconvenience -- indeed, not to breathe fresh air if possible. When the urge to travel seizes you, you pile into your thirteen-ton tin palace and drive 400 miles across the country, hermetically sealed against the elements, and stop at a campground where you dash to plug into their water supply and electricity so that you don't have to go a single moment without air-conditioning or dishwasher and microwave facilities. These things, these RVs, are like life-support systems on wheels. Astronauts go to the moon with less backup. RV people are another breed -- and a largely demented one at that. They become obsessed with trying to equip their vehicles with gadgets to deal with every possible contingency. Their lives become ruled by the dread thought that one day they may find themselves in a situation in which they are not entirely self-sufficient. [...]
[Chapter 9, p. 84-85]
At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America -- a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn't have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature. The ugliness intensified to fever pitch as I rolled into Gatlinburg, a community that had evidently dedicated itself to the endless quest of trying to redefine the lower limits of bad taste. It is the world capital of tat. It made Cherokee look decorous. There is not much more to it than a single milelong main street, but it was packed from end to end with the most dazzling profusion of tourist clutter - the Elvis Presley Hall of Fame, [...] the National Bible Museum, Hillbilly Village, Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, the American Historical Wax Museum, Gatlinburg Space Needle, something called Paradise Island, something else called World of Illusions, [...] Guinness Book of Records Exhibition Center and, not least, the Irlene Mandrell Hall of Stars Museum and Shopping Mall. In between this galaxy of entertainments were scores of parking lots and noisy, crowded restaurants, junk-food stalls, ice cream parlors and gift shops of the sort that sell "wanted" posters with YOUR NAME HERE and baseball caps with droll embellishments, like a coil of realistic-looking plastic turd on the brim. [...]
I loved it. When I was growing up, we never got to go to places like Gatlinburg. My father would rather have given himself brain surgery with a Black and Decker drill than spend an hour in such a place. He had just two criteria for gauging the worth of a holiday attraction: Was it educational and was it free? Gatlinburg was patently neither of these. His idea of holiday heaven was a museum without an admission charge. [...] So Gatlinburg to me was a heady experience. I felt like a priest let loose in Las Vegas with a sockful of quarters. All the noise and glitter, and above all the possibilities for running through irresponsible sums of money in a short period, made me giddy.
[...] I went through the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum and I savored every artifact and tasteless oddity. It was outstanding. I mean honestly, where else are you going to see a replica of Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria, made entirely of chicken bones? And how can you possibly put a price on seeing an eightfoot-long model of the Circus Maximus constructed of sugar cubes, or the death mask of John Dillinger, or a room made entirely of matchsticks by one Reg Polland of Manchester, England (well done, Reg; Britain is proud of you)? We are talking lasting memories here. [...]
[Chapter 9, p. 86-88]
[...] For a while it troubled me that I could live in America for twenty years, have the benefit of an expensive education and not know anything at all about one of the fifty states. I went around asking people if they had ever heard Delaware mentioned on television or seen a story pertaining to it in the newspaper or read a novel set there and they'd say, "You know, I don't think I ever have," and then they'd look kind of troubled too.
I determined that I would read up on Delaware [...] But I could find almost nothing written about Delaware anywhere. Even the entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica was only about two paragraphs long and finished in the middle of a sentence, as I recall. And the funny thing was that as I drove across Delaware now I could feel it vanishing from my memory as I went, like those children's drawing slates on which you erase the picture by lifting the transparent sheet. It was as if a giant sheet were being lifted up behind me as I drove, expunging the experience as it unfolded. [...]
[Chapter 12, p. 109]
[...] Do you know that if you are a black man in urban America you now stand a one-in-nineteen chance of being murdered? In World War 11, the odds of being killed were one in fifty. In New York City there is one murder every four hours. Murder there has become the most common cause of death for people under thirty-five-and yet New York isn't even the most murderous city in America. At least eight other cities have a higher murder rate. In Los Angeles there are more murders on schoolgrounds alone each year than there are in the whole of London. So perhaps it is little wonder that people in American cities take violence as routine. I don't know how they do it.
[Chapter 13, p. 111]
[...] Through my dad's old binoculars I could clearly see how Pickett's troops had advanced from the direction of the town, a mile or so to the north, sweeping across the Burger King parking lot, skirting the Tastee Delite Drive-In and regrouping just outside the Crap-o-Rama Wax Museum and Gift Shop. It's all very sad. Ten thousand soldiers fell there in an hour; two out of every three Confederate soldiers didn't make it back to base. It is a pity, verging on the criminal, that so much of the town of Gettysburg has been spoiled with tourist tat and that it is so visible from the battlefield.
[Chapter 13, p. 117]
You only go on a long-distance bus in the United States because either you cannot afford to fly or -- and this is really licking the bottom of the barrel in America -- you cannot afford a car. Being unable to afford a car in America is the last step before living out of a plastic sack. As a result, most of the people on long-distance buses are one of the following: mentally defective, actively schizoid, armed and dangerous, in a drugged stupor, just released from prison or nuns. Occasionally you will also see a pair of Norwegian students. You can tell they are Norwegian students because they are so pink faced and healthy-looking and they wear little pale blue ankle socks with their sandals.
By and large a ride on a long-distance bus in America combines most of the shortcomings of prison life with those of an ocean crossing in a troopship. So when the bus pulled up before me, heaving a pneumatic sigh, and its doors flapped open, 1 boarded it with some misgivings. The driver himself didn't look any too stable. He had the sort of hair you associ