Reviewed by Marc Pierce, University of Texas at Austin

This book explores the origins of various expressions found in American English. Rosemary Ostler has published extensively on such topics and maintains two informative and interesting websites (http://www.rosemarie-ostler.com and http://www.vintage-vocabulary.com). It treats over 150 such expressions in four major sections: ‘The natural world’; ‘Business, politics, and society at large’; ‘Culture and amusements’; and ‘The home front’, each of which is divided into various chapters (for instance, the section on ‘The natural world’ contains chapters on ‘The great American outdoors’ and ‘Behaving like an animal’.) Sample entries include both older expressions like ‘build a better mousetrap’ (traditionally attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson) and more recent terms like ‘jump the shark’ (derived from a 1977 episode of the television program Happy Days in which the character Fonzie jumps over a shark while waterskiing).

The entries briefly outline the meanings of the terms and consider possible etymologies, and often conclude with discussions of current uses of the terms. For example, the entry on ‘be out in left field’, glossed by O as ‘[h]ave an extreme opinion or unorthodox approach, which is probably wrong … [or to] be away from the center of activity’ (162), found in the section on ‘Culture and amusements’, first defines ‘left field’, and then notes that it has been attested since at least the 1930s. (A 1937 article in the San Francisco Chronicle uses the term, indicating that it must have been reasonably well-established by that time.) O then reviews three proposals of the origin of the term: (i) that it originated in the 1920s when Babe Ruth was playing right field for the Yankees, and people who bought tickets to sit in the opposite end of the field from Ruth were both foolish and far from the action; (ii) that it arose from a geographic coincidence, as the left field wall at the West Side Grounds in Chicago, home of the Chicago Cubs from 1893–1915, abutted the Neuropsychiatric Institute of the University of Illinois, so ‘anyone playing near the left field was getting close to mingling with psychiatric cases’ (163); and (iii) that in many early baseball stadiums, left field was farther from home plate (and thus the action of the game) than right field was. The third hypothesis is in fact O’s own proposal; she rejects the first on the grounds that Ruth ‘batted left-handed, so presumably he would have hit the ball into right field as well’ (163), and the second because the Neuropsychiatric Institute did not abut the West Side Grounds during the time the Cubs played there. The entry concludes with a few notes on current usage, considering the parallel expression ‘come out of left field’ and the political implications of the term, among other issues.

This is a very fun book—informative, readable, and a handy guide to numerous Americanisms. It is well worth the purchase price, and the time and energy to read and digest it.