The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

And there was Mr. Levi Strauss, who made his fortune providing hard-wearing clothes for the miners. He used a cloth called geane fustian, a three-hundred-year-old English name derived from its original manufacture in Genoa. “Levis” and “jeans” were born and show no signs of age or ageing as they stride into their third century. But Mr. Strauss’s products were distinguished by the modesty of their name. It was the time of Tall Talk and talking up, as if words could conjure reality into being. This became the particular fever of the “booster,” whose job was to talk up property, talk up prospects, talk up gold, talk up the west to whip on to fever the tens of thousands tumbling out of the settled cities of the east, headed for El Dorado. A single-room school might be called a college, a flea-pit could be called a hotel, and, in the spirit not of exaggeration but anticipation, a one-street town could be called a city. And what cities! Out in the west there is Rome, Cairo, Paris and Paradise City. Superior ghost towns in Kansas include Alexandria, Athens, Berlin, Calcutta, London, Moscow, Oxford and Sparta. Mining camps could get names like Bonanza, Wealthy City, Gold Hill or Rich Bar. The spirit of Davy Crockett would not be denied, and we have Dead Mule Canyon, Jackson’s Gulch, Hardscrabble, Poverty Hill, Hell-for-Noon City, Slumgullion, One Eye and Quack Hill. The vigour comes from speech, the speech of men on a high and in a hurry, loving to land a KO with words.