How our culture shaped our language

Two books in one, Bill Bryson's Made in America (1994) is both a lively history of popular culture in America and an etymology of the words and phrases that grew out of that culture.

Bryson tells us what the Puritans did for fun, how frozen foods were invented (by accident, like so much else), how McDonald's restaurants came to be (Ray Kroc actually had little to do with it), why in wagon trains the wagons actually traveled not in line but side by side and that the first hit movie, although it was not yet called a movie, was Fred Ott's Sneeze, showing exactly what the title says.

Shopping carts originated in Oklahoma City back in 1936, Bryson tells us, but the inventor, Sylvan Goldman, had to hire people to demonstrate to customers how to use them. 

What does George Washington's home, Mount Vernon, have to do with the word groggy? The plantation was named after the British admiral Edward Vernon, whose nickname was Old Grog. The daily ration of rum Vernon gave his sailors came to be known as grog, and those who drank too much of it were said to be groggy.

Such "classic Italian dishes" as chicken tetrazzini, veal parmigiana, fettuccine Alfredo and even spaghetti and meatballs originated in the United States. So did Russian dressing, French dressing and chop sued.

In the 1990 census 40 percent more Americans claimed to be Indians than 10 years previously. Was Elizabeth Warren one of these?

And so Bryson goes on for 400 pages. The author has a knack for digging up obscure trivia and then presenting it in entertaining prose. Open the book to any paragraph and you are likely to find something interesting that you won't remember ever hearing before — and probably won't remember tomorrow.