Bill Bryson's African Diary by Bill Bryson

Author:Bill Bryson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Non-fiction, Travel, Adventure, Humour
ISBN: 9780307418845
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 2002-12-03T10:00:00+00:00

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 English in 1806. A later challenger was lounge, which originally signified a type of chair or sofa, then a jacket for relaxing in, and finally, from 1881, a room. In America, living room came into being in about 1870, and quite rapidly drove parlor out of use there, but failed to catch on elsewhere.

Assuming he was a conventional sort of fellow, Mr. Marsham would have strived

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