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A review by aemily
Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States by Bill Bryson
2.0
I have some really mixed feelings about this book!
It took me longer than normal to read, in part because of the way it was organized. The chapters are thematic and sort of chronological, but not always. While I expected more information about linguistic forms that originated or came into common use in America, the book is almost exclusively about words that came about because of new stuff; I imagined that the word “telegraph” came about at the time of the invention of the telegraph, so I don’t need that fact spelled out. It often felt like a brief version of a US history textbook rather than a book about language.
There are also some specious claims: at one point, Bryson writes that there never was a word ‘penny.’ Of course there is! It may be an interesting oddity that this word does not appear in the texts he was looking at, but any linguist—or reasonable person, for that matter—would agree that the word exists. The final chapter rubbed me the wrong way as a teacher of English learners. Not only did he graze over some statistics about American children’s’ reading abilities, he danced around some opinions about immigrants learning English. It was as if he was trying to walk a perfect line between ‘it’s America, speak English’ and ‘immigrants are great,’ but executed both positions poorly.
There are interesting tidbits, to be sure, but I would not use this as a basis for understanding English in America.
It took me longer than normal to read, in part because of the way it was organized. The chapters are thematic and sort of chronological, but not always. While I expected more information about linguistic forms that originated or came into common use in America, the book is almost exclusively about words that came about because of new stuff; I imagined that the word “telegraph” came about at the time of the invention of the telegraph, so I don’t need that fact spelled out. It often felt like a brief version of a US history textbook rather than a book about language.
There are also some specious claims: at one point, Bryson writes that there never was a word ‘penny.’ Of course there is! It may be an interesting oddity that this word does not appear in the texts he was looking at, but any linguist—or reasonable person, for that matter—would agree that the word exists. The final chapter rubbed me the wrong way as a teacher of English learners. Not only did he graze over some statistics about American children’s’ reading abilities, he danced around some opinions about immigrants learning English. It was as if he was trying to walk a perfect line between ‘it’s America, speak English’ and ‘immigrants are great,’ but executed both positions poorly.
There are interesting tidbits, to be sure, but I would not use this as a basis for understanding English in America.