America's independence from England wasn't just fought on the battlefield. Early Americans insisted on a new way of speaking that would be a distinctly American variation of English.
Linguist Rosemarie Ostler, who lives in Eugene, has traced the evolution of American English, and the cultural mix that produced terms like "gerrymander" and "gnarly." She lays them out in her book Splendiferous Speech.We go the whole hog and bark up the right tree in an interview with the author.