Made In America (51 page)

Christmas likewise got off to an erratic start in America, not least because the Puritans disdained it, regarding it (not altogether inaccurately) as a pagan festival. In 1659 they went so far as to ban it altogether, and it remained widely suppressed in New England into the 1800s.
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Partly because of this interruption of tradition, 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 time these three bags evolved into three golden balls and became, by some complicated leap of logic, the three balls associated with pawnbroking. In the late eighteenth century St Nicholas and the presents that went with him were borrowed from the Dutch but transferred to the nearest Anglican holiday, 25 December. At the same time, the now wholly secular figure of Santa Claus became bizarrely bound up with
Christkindlein,
the Christ child, and thus took on the alternative designation
Kris Kringle.

The Christmas tree and the practice of sending greeting cards arrived from Germany – they are often attributed
to Queen Victoria’s German consort, Prince Albert – and gradually became part of the Christmas tradition in the nineteenth century. The first mention of a Christmas tree in America is in 1846. Carols (etymologically related to
choral
)
,
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.)

The American artitude towards Christmas and how to celebrate it was long ambivalent. On the one hand Macy’s was staying open till midnight on Christmas Eve as far back as 1867 in order to deal with the clamour to buy presents. But on the other, the practice of decorating trees was so late in developing that even in 1880 a manufacturer of ornaments could persuade F. W. Woolworth to take no more than $25 of his stock. (Before the decade was out, however, Woolworth had upped the order to $800,000.)
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It may come as a surprise to learn that there are no official national 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.

If revelries were seldom given official blessing in America, they generally found private outlets. Though those who governed the early colonies tried almost everywhere to subdue the national impulse to engage in dissolute pursuits, they didn’t often succeed. Cock-fighting, dog-fighting, bear-baiting, drinking to excess and gambling were available to those who wished to find them, and not just on scattered feast days. Horse-racing, too, was widely popular, especially in Virginia, though suitable venues that offered a level surface and a measure of privacy were not always easy to find.
Outside Jamestown there existed a particularly favourable stretch of road a quarter of a mile long. It became so popular as a location of illicit races that it led to the breeding of a new strain of horse, the quarter-horse, which lacked stamina but could sprint at enormous speed for short distances.
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Horse-racing would later endow the American vocabulary with a wealth of terms, among them
frontrunner, inside track, to win by a nose, sure thing, also-ran
and
bookie,
though some of these would have to wait some time before finding general acceptance.
Bookie,
for instance, isn’t found in print before 1885.
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In the Appalachian region, wrestling – or
wrassling
– of a particularly brutal nature became popular early on and evidently stayed both brutal and popular up to this century. Many of those who settled the region hailed from northern England, home of Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, a contest that is thought to date from Viking times and remains popular to this day at country fêtes and other such gatherings throughout the English Lake District and slightly beyond. In it, two men embrace in a standing position, and with occasional bursts of grunting exertion, mixed with longer periods of strategic stillness (during which a spectator could be excused for thinking that they had temporarily nodded off), try to throw each other to the ground. It was, and in England remains, a gentlemanly pursuit. In the more rough-and-tumble environment of Kentucky and Virginia, however, Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling evolved into something rather more aggressive. Competitors grew their thumbnails long and filed their teeth to a point the better to inflict damage. Anything was permissible – pulling hair, gouging eyes, biting, stomping on a windpipe – so long as it was done with bare hands.

Fischer recounts the story of a fight between two men – and if you are squeamish you might just want to flit your eyes to the next paragraph – in which the winner secured an early
advantage by gouging his opponent’s eyes from his head with his thumbs. ‘The sufferer roared aloud, but uttered no complaint’ and astonishingly refused to give up the fight, according to one eyewitness. Not until his opponent had additionally bitten off his nose and torn his ears from his head did he at last conclude that discretion and the loss of a usable face were the better part of valour.
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Naturally, large sums of money changed hands at these spectacles. The Puritan ethic notwithstanding, Americans evinced an irrepressible urge to wager from the earliest days. Early gambling pursuits gave us many terms that have since passed into general usage.
Tinhorn,
meaning cheap or disreputable, comes from a metal cylinder of that name used to shake dice in games like
chuck-a-luck
(or
chutter-luck
) and
hazard. Pass the buck
came from the custom of passing a buck-horn knife as a way of keeping track of whose turn it was to deal or ante, and thus it is etymologically unrelated to
buck
as a slang term for dollar. American gambling led to a broadening of
bet
into the wider language in expressions like ‘you bet I do’, ‘you bet your life’, and so on, which foreign observers commonly noted as a distinguishing characteristic of American speech by the early nineteenth century. Mark Twain told the story of a westerner who had to break the news of Joe Toole’s death to his widow. ‘Does Joe Toole live here?’ the westerner asks, and when the wife answers in the affirmative, he says, ‘Bet you he don’t!’
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Among the favourite card games until about the time of the American Revolution were
whist
(a word of unknown derivation, but possibly related to
whisk
),
brag
(so called because of the bravado required of betters) and
muggins
(whence the term for a gullible person or victim of fate). But by the closing years of the century they were giving way to
faro,
a game first mentioned in Britain in 1713. Corrupted from
pharaoh
(a pharaoh was pictured on one of the cards of 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;
hence the expression
from soda to hock,
and also
to be in hock.
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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.
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Gradually faro was displaced by
poker.
Dispute surrounds the origins of the name. The most plausible guess is that it comes from a similar German game called
Pochspiel,
in which players who passed would call,
‘Poche’,
pronounced ‘polka’.
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Others have suggested that it may have some hazy connection to
poke
or
puck
(an English dialectal word meaning to strike, whence the name of the hard black disc used in ice hockey) or to the Norse-Danish
pokker,
‘devil’, from which comes the
Puck
of English folklore. At all events,
poker
is an Americanism first recorded in 1848. In its very early days the game was also commonly referred to as
poko
or
poka.

Among the many terms that have passed into the main body of English from poker are
deal
in the sense of a transaction,
jackpot, penny-ante, to stand pat,
and
just for openers. 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, jack-in-the-box, jack-o’-lantern, jack-of-all-trades, jackrabbit, jackstraw, 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.

According to Dillard,
ace, deuce
and
trey,
for
one, two
and
three,
are also American, through the influence of French gamblers of New Orleans. He may be right in the case of
trey,
but the first two were in common use in Britain in the Middle Ages and may date from Norman times.
Ace
comes ultimately from the Latin
ās,
a basic unit of currency, and
deuce
from the Latin
duōs,
or ‘two’. The French gamblers of New Orleans did, however, give us another venerable gambling term:
to shoot craps.
In New Orleans the game the English called
hazard
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, though it left no linguistic legacy beyond its name.

More productive in terms of its linguistic impact was a much later introduction to America,
bridge,
which arrived 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.
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At about the time that bridge was establishing itself in America, a native-born gaming device was born:
the slot machine.
Slot machines of various types were produced in America as early as the 1890s, but they didn’t come into their own until 1910 when an enterprising firm called the Mills Novelty Company introduced a vending machine for chewing-gum, which dispensed gum in accordance with flavours depicted on three randomly spinning wheels. The flavours were cherry, orange, and plum – symbols that are used on slot machines to this day. Each wheel also contained a bar reading ‘1910 Fruit Gum’, three of which in a row
led to a particularly lavish payout, just as it does today. Also just as today a lemon in any row meant no payout at all – and from this comes
lemon
in the sense of something that is disappointing or inadequate. The potential of slot machines for higher stakes than pieces of chewing-gum wasn’t lost on the manufacturers and soon, converted to monetary payouts, they were appearing everywhere that gambling was legal, though no one thought to call them
one-armed bandits
until the 1950s.
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Partly in response to the popularity of gambling, a pious young New Englander named Anne Abbott invented a wholesome alternative in 1843:
the board game.
Board games like chess and checkers had of course been around for centuries and in almost all cultures, but never before had anyone devised a competitive entertainment in which players followed a path through a representation of the real world. Abbott intended the game not just as an amusement, but as an aid to upright living. Called
The Mansion of Happiness,
it required competitors to travel the board in pursuit of Eternal Salvation, avoiding such pitfalls along the way as Perjury, Robbery, Immodesty, Ingratitude and Drunkenness. The idea of moving a playing piece along a route beset with hazards was hugely novel in 1843, and not only made Abbott a tidy sum but also inspired a flock of imitators.

One was a young man named Milton Bradley, who produced his first hit,
The Checkered Game of Life,
in 1860. Also morally uplifting, it was clearly inspired by, if not actually modelled on, Abbot’s elevating divertissement. Bradley’s most original stroke, however, came when he devised a way of packing eight separate games, among them checkers, chess, backgammon and dominoes, into a small, easily portable box, which proved a hit with soldiers during the Civil War.

Rather more innovative was George Swinton Parker, founder of the second great name of the American games industry, Parker Brothers. Born into a venerable but declining
family in Salem, Massachusetts, Parker loved the idea of board games, but hankered for a reward more immediately gratifying than future salvation. In 1883, aged just sixteen, he created a game called
Banking
in which the object was to speculate one’s way to wealth. A new games-playing ethos was born, one that seized the imagination of Americans. As the writer Peter Andrews has put it: ‘Instead of the most pious player reaping the most joy in the next world, the smartest player got the most money in this one.’
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