Glory Road (1904? 1917? Civil War?)

[James Landau]

> [Original Message]
> From: <Bapopik at AOL.COM>
> To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Date: 12/31/2005 12:42:07 PM
> Subject: Glory Road (1904? 1917? Civil War?)
>
> GLORY ROAD--792,000 Google hits
> GLORY ROAD--0 hits on both Making of America databases
> GLORY ROAD--0 hits on Wright American Fiction database (1851-1875)
> ...
> ...
> Glory Road? If it's a Civil War term, where are the citations? Clement
Wood
> popularized "Glory Road," but did not coin the term.

Yes, it sounds like a Civil War term, but a quickie search of my Civil War
collection failed to turn it up.  There is of course Catton's book _Glory
Road---The Bloody Route from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg_ (Garden City NY:
Dolphin Books (imprint of Doubleday), 1952, no ISBN on the edition I have)
but a quick look through the book failed to turn up that term.  On the
other hand Catton has a good ear for Civil War language and seems to prefer
period quotes to his own coinages, so it may be in there somewhere hiding.

While searching for "Glory Road" I found to my surprise that "Rough
Riders", which I had assumed to have been invented for the Spanish-American
War troopers, was a nickname for Morgan's cavalrymen in the Civil War.

OT:  I wasn't listening closely and probably misheard, but I thought I
heard an announcer on NPR Sunday say "NPR serves America's incest in the
news".  If correct, a memorable eggcorn.

A mondegreen not previously reported here:  In the Irish war song
"O'Donnell Aboo" one of the stanzas begins with the line "Wildly o'er
Desmond the war wolf is howling."  This is easily misheard as "Wiley
O'Desmond the war wolf is howling" and I know of a man named Desmond who at
least briefly got nicknamed "Wiley" due to this mondegreen.

I can't find the original message but yes I agree with the person who said
"they" (I think it was "she") disliked "God Bless America" because of the
stereotype of the people who like to sing it.  I too have a stereotype of
"God Bless America" being sung mainly by little old ladies in tennis shoes
(and I suspect a lot of othe people do, too).  I might add that,. to the
literal-minded, the song has no business becoming the post-9/11 anthem
because the words plainly state "When the war clouds gather FAR ACROSS THE
SEA" and 9/11 occurred within the US borders.

"Roger Young" also suffers from an interesting context.  It was introduced
to the post-World War II audience by Robert Heinlein's remarkable
tour-de-force of a bad novel, _Starship Troopers_

    - Jim Landau