That is why, for instance, horses in New England {as in East Anglia} neigh, while those in the middle states of America {and the Midlands of England} whinny.

Baseball remains one of the most fertile grounds for inventive wordplay in American life. Among the more notable-and on the face of it more bewildering-recent neologisms are to dial 8 for a home run...

E Pluribus Unum, "One from Many," was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.}

As early colonists employed odd spellings, so too they often brought unexpected pronunciations with them. This was particularly the case in Virginia, where the leading families had a special fondness...

If you have ever wondered why radio and television stations always have call signs beginning with W or K, the answer is that those letters were assigned to American airwaves by an international...

if we wished to find a modern-day model for British and American speech of the late eighteenth century, we could probably do no better than Yosemite Sam.

Once there were many more in like vein-e.g., tuifu {the ultimate in fuckups}, tarfu {things are really fucked up}, fubar {fucked up beyond all recognition}, and fubid {fuck you, buddy, I'm detached}.

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}

Columbus never found Antilla or anything else he was looking for. His epochal voyage of 1492 was almost the last thing-indeed almost the only thing-that went right in his life. Within eight years, he...

the Pilgrims didn't have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English-Samoset only a little, but Squanto with total assurance {and some Spanish into...

{For much the same reason, early owners discovered that if they charged odd amounts like 49 cents or 99 cents the cashier would very probably have to open the drawer to extract a penny change,...

Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but...

Until 1916, New Hampshire had a stream called the Quohquinapassakessamanagnog, but then the cheerless bureaucrats at the Board on Geographic Names in Washington, D.C., arbitrarily changed it to Beaver...

there any evidence that Henry ever uttered the other famous remark attributed to him: "I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death." Indeed, there is no...

the starling, which was brought to America by one Eugene Schieffelin, a wealthy German emigrant who had the odd, and in the case of starlings regrettable, idea that he should introduce to the American...

That a word or phrase hasn't been recorded tells us only that it hasn't been recorded, not that it hasn't existed. The

The New York Times, with what was threatening to become a customary lack of prescience, forecast that it would never be a serious competitor for radio because "people must sit and keep their eyes...

They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six

Advertising was already a well-established phenomenon by the turn of the twentieth century. Newspapers had begun carrying ads as far back as the early 1700s, and magazines soon followed. {Benjamin...

Television didn't attract much public notice until Bell Telephone demonstrated its new system in New York in April 1927. Shown on a screen two inches high by three inches wide-roughly the dimensions...

The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.

Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but...

Eenie, meenie, minie, mo is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic.

It would be possible to sail from Scandinavia to Canada without once crossing more than 250 miles of open sea.

Between December 1606 and February 1625, Virginia received 7,289 immigrants and buried 6,040 of them. Most barely had time to settle in. All but 500 of the 3,500 immigrants who arrived in the three...

he also engaged in many charitable works, notably the building of one of the world's largest orphanages for boys {and boys alone; orphan girls would have to look elsewhere}

Lagniappe, usually attributed to the French of New Orleans, in fact originated among the Kechuan Indians of Peru as yapa. The Spanish adopted it as ñapa. The French then took it from the Spanish and...

Fired by the oxygen of irrationality, America entered a period of grave intolerance, not just toward immigrants but toward any kind of antiestablishment behavior. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it...

The early colonists were among the first to use the new word goodbye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled Godbwye