Bill Bryson's African Diary by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online

Our integrated programs in more than 60 countries not only provide immediate assistance to families in need, they also work with communities to create long-term solutions to poverty.
    We believe that together we can make the world better, more stable and safer for all. We take this goal seriously. So it’s not enough to simply alleviate the symptoms of poverty. CARE works with communities to find the source of the problem and solve it. For good.

MOVING AHEAD WITH CARE
    Our efforts to overcome poverty depend on the support of people like you—people who care about the world in which they live. With your help, we can create lasting, positive change in communities around the world.
    CARE is an effective and efficient steward of your investment. We direct 90 percent of our expended resources toward an array of poverty-fighting programs. And on average, for every $1 in private support raised, CARE can leverage another $5 in support from public sources.
    To learn more about CARE and how to join our efforts to overcome poverty, please visit CARE’s global homepage, www.care.org .

ALSO BY BILL BRYSON
    The Lost Continent
    Mother Tongue
    Neither Here nor There
    Made in America
    Notes from a Small Island
    A Walk in the Woods
    I’m a Stranger Here Myself
    In a Sunburned Country
    Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words

Go to the Next Page to Read Chapter 7 from
Bill Bryson’s
At Home
    Coming in October 2010

An Excerpt from Bill Bryson’s At Home
    THE DRAWING ROOM
    I
    If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of having comfort at home was so unfamiliar that no word existed for the condition.
Comfortable
meant merely “capable of being consoled.” Comfort was something you gave to the wounded or distressed. The first person to use the word in its modern sense was the writer Horace Walpole, who remarked in a letter to a friend in 1770 that a certain Mrs. White was looking after him well and making him “as comfortable as is possible.” By the early nineteenth century, everyone was talking about having a comfortable home or enjoying a comfortable living, but before Walpole’s day no one did.
    Nowhere in the house is the spirit (if not always the actuality) of comfort better captured than in the curiously named room in which we find ourselves now, the drawing room. The term is a shortening of the much older
withdrawing room
, meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy, and it has never settled altogether comfortably into widespread English usage. For a time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
drawing room
was challenged in more refined circles by the French
salon
, which was sometimes anglicized to
saloon
, but both those words gradually became associated with spaces outside the home, so that
saloon
came first to signify a room for socializing in a hotel or on a ship, then a place for dedicated drinking, and finally, and a little unexpectedly, a type of automobile.
Salon
, meanwhile, became indelibly attached to places associated with artistic endeavors before being appropriated (from about 1910) by providers of hair care and beauty treatments.
Parlor
, the word long favored by Americans for the main room of the home, has a kind of nineteenth-century frontier feel to it, but in fact is the oldest word of all. It was first used in 1225, referring to a room where monks could go to talk (it is from the French
parler
, “to speak”), and was extended to secular contexts by the last quarter of the following century.
    Drawing room
is the name used by Edward Tull on his floorplan of the Old Rectory, and almost certainly is the term employed by the well-bred Mr. Marsham, though he was probably in a minority even then. By mid-century it was being supplanted in all but the most genteel circles by
sitting room
, a term first appearing in