The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

The old French presence came into its own along the Mississippi. It’s in the place names, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette in the south and up north in St. Louis, Cape Girardeau and French “villes” everywhere — Belleville, Abbeville, Centreville, Pineville, Jacksonville. “Shanty,” “sashay,” “chute,” all come in from the French, as does one of the great meeting places in the west, the “hotel.” In France, a hotel was a grand private house or a municipal building. In America it became — at its best — a palace for the people, meant to be a cut above the taverns and inns of old England, meant to offer style and a secure lodging place in a shifting, growing, booming busty world, offering the best to anyone who could rake up the modest charges. The word can be found in Smollett in 1765, but “hotel” is a good example of a word that not only changed its meaning but was to take off, first in America and then elsewhere, into a host of other meanings, nuanced, varied, rich, bare: the hotels of Raymond Chandler in downtown Los Angeles, the hotels of Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s, the rich glitz of Truman Capote in the mid century, places open to all who could pay, an oasis, and in some cases a shot at paradise. In the early days there were some who did indeed refer to hotels as “People’s Palaces.”