A funny thing happened on the way to the movies. The term is attested as a title in a New York publication of 1912, "'Movies' and the Law." But movies hadn't started out with such a slangy name. Instead, at their birth in 1889, celluloid images of motion were dignified with compound words derived from classical Greek elements by their inventor, Thomas Edison. He called his camera a kinetograph, from the Greek words for "motion" and "write," and his projector a kinetoscope, from the words for "motion" and "view." A decade later a competitor patented a similar device with the name biograph, from the Greek for "life" and "write," as in biography.

That should have been that. Edison and his successors were following the usual practice of nineteenth-century inventors who had given us the telegraph (1805), photograph (1839), telephone (1876), and phonograph (1877), not to mention kinetics (1864), kinesiology (1894), and the lithograph (1825), seismograph (1858), kaleidoscope (1817), and periscope (1879). But unlike these others, the movies escaped from the Greek. First they were known by the plain descriptive terms motion pictures or moving pictures. Then somebody began saying movies, and soon everybody was.

Well, not everybody. The producers and exhibitors of motion pictures, anxious to elevate their art, resisted the designation movies, though to little avail. They added sound to their pictures and were rewarded with the name talkies, which disappeared only when all films had sound and were called movies once again. In the 1920s, they established the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences--only to have their annual awards nicknamed with the trademark Oscars.

The cinema has indeed become an art form in the twentieth century. But it is as a mass medium rather than as an elite art that American movies have permeated the whole world with our culture, or at least with glamorous stereotypes of the American way of life.

America in So Many Words, by David K.Barnhart and Allan A. Metcalf. Copyright © 1997 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.