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Speaking Freely: A Guided Tour of American English from Plymouth Rock to Silicon Valley

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The thought occurred to me, while leafing through this massive compendium of American English words and phrases, how much our language is a reflection of our cultures and beliefs. While the French and French Canadians man the bulwarks to guard against incursion against English words, we act like Libertarians on a toot, recklessly throwing open the windows and doors and letting whatever is out there to come in. While our mother tongue is not at the same level of complexity as Chinese dialects or the Japanese language, there can be no doubt that, upon realizing for the first time that the words tough, plough and dough are not spoken the same way, that some serious mutations have been going on.

"Speaking Freely" is based in part on two books by Stuart Flexner -- "I Hear America Talking" and "Listening to America" -- and edited and amended by Atlantic Monthly "Word Watch" columnist Anne Soukhanov. Each chapter approaches a given field -- such as politics, sex, food or cyberspace -- and rambles about like an enthusiastic, but absent-minded, professor, nittering on about one thing and, just when you've eased into the argument, switching to some equally fascinating fact. Unnerving.

But that's the way the language flows: freshly minted words appear, secure in their meanings, only to be kidnaped and altered. They're transplanted to other parts of sentences, their definitions altered without anesthesia, new meanings are grafted on. When it comes to words, we're the aliens with the anal probes.

Take the word snaw. We take the Old English word, transplanted the "a" for an "o" and called it snow. Then it's glued onto other words to form new meanings: snowfall (1821), snow forts (1853), snowstorms (1771), snowbanks (1779) and snowflakes (1734).

By the early 1900s, probably shaken from all the distensions, snow fell in with a rough crowd. It started staying out later in the dictionary, probably trying to forget its roots. It began to mean heroin or cocaine, due, in the words of dictionary of criminal slang, "from the extremely flocculent nature of cocaine when pulverized." Women who brought addicts to the dope peddlers became known as snowbirds. That word managed to get off the junk, reform, and found a happy retirement describing Northerners who flee south for the winter.

"Speaking Freely" is full of stories like the above, and one can quickly become overwhelmed with the variety of words, their origins and derivations. There's scarcely a language that hasn't been pillaged:

* skedaddle (1861, from the Greek skedannunai, or to split up);
* petroleum (15th century Latin, from petr/petra "rock" plus oleum "oil");
* scrimmage (15th century Middle English for a minor battle or skirmish);
* moccasin (1612, from the Algonquian tribe's mockasin);
* honcho (1947, from Japanese han "squad" plus cho "leader")
* Yankees (1758, from the Dutch Jan Kees, "John Cheese," a derogatory term for the Dutch pirates coined by the British, who later applied it to the colonists).

Then there are the words which take multiple meanings without any rhyme or reason. The B-52 spent five decades as the name for a bomber, becoming in later life a ladies' hairstyle, an alcoholic drink and a rock band.

For those who like following the history and mutations of words, "Speaking Freely" is an amiable, eccentric guide to an amiable, eccentric language.

A highly recommended read for anyone new into the country. Sure to put an end to those drab lunches with your American colleagues at work as they blabber away about a certain Uncle Jesse or even worse some 'hickey' they had from their last night's 'getting laid'...