book excerptise: a book unexamined is wasting trees

The Mother Tongue: English & How it Got that Way

Bill Bryson

Bryson, Bill;

The Mother Tongue: English & How it Got that Way

W. Morrow, 1990, 270 pages

ISBN 0888078958



topics: | language | english | history | uk



English - a humorous biography

Opening with some of the hilarious ways English is used - hotels announcing that the chambermaid will be happy to "flatten your underwear" (Yugoslavia) or injunctions to "tootle the horn" when a "passenger of the foot heaves into sight" (Tokyo), the book goes on to develop the unreasonable-ness of the language (but then, which language isn't)? The point is that these attempts reflect more the power of English as a global language which make its idiosyncracies all the more visible. English is the de facto interlingua for business, not only internationally, but also in large nations with developed languages like India, or across Africa, or even in Eastern Europe. Learning English is a path to career advancement in countless nations, and teaching English is a huge business.

Bryson takes you on a roller-coaster tour, intermixed with tough quizzes. even as a father of two caesarean sons, i could not detect the mis-spelling in caesarian.

So keep your belt fastened, or you may fall ROFL!

Excerpts

More than 300 mn people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to. It would be charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed. Consider this hearty announcement in a Yugoslavian hotel: The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway. warning in Tokyo: When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him mlodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor. 1

Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy.

To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. [p. 1]

A ydycg wedi talu a dodi eich tocyn yn y golwg? - A sign in a Welsh parking lot. It means "Did you remember to pay?" 80 percent of all Welsh people do not speak Welsh. e.g. Llandudno is pronounced "klan-did-no" No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently. Consider just a few: heard - beard; road - broad; five - give; fillet - skillet; early - dearly; beau - beauty; steak - streak; ache - moustache; low - how; doll - droll; scour - pour; four - tour; grieve - sieve; paid - said; break - speak; [ go - to; bathe - lather; - AM] ... most famously the letter cluster "ough" can be pronounced in any of eight ways - as in through, though, thought, tough, plough, thorough, hiccough and lough.

Loan words in Other tongues

contronym: Sometimes, just to heighten confusion, the same word has contradictory meanings. Sanction, for example, can either signify permission to do something or a measure forbidding it to be done.

Almost everyone in the world speaks on the telephone or the telefoon, or even, in China, the te le fung... In 1986, The Economist assembled a list of English terms that had become more or less universal. They were: Airport, hotel, telephone, bar, soda, cigarette, sport, golf, tennis, stop, O.K., weekend, jeans, know-how, sex appeal, and no problem.

... a "herkot" is what a Ukrainian goes to his barber for.

... the Italian "schiacchenze" is simply a literal rendering of the English "shake hands".

Longest words: German

Wirtschaftstreuhandgesellschaft (business trust company) Bundesbahngestelltenwitwe (widos of federal rail employee) Kriegsgefangenanentsch\"adigungsgesetz (law about war reparations) Dutch company names often have 40 letters of more, e.g. Douwe Egberts Koninlijke Tabaksfabriek-Koffiebranderijen-Theehandal Naamloze Vennootschap (Douwe Egberts Royal tobacco factory-Coffee roasters - Tea traders Inc.) At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." (p.19) Take the simple word "what" - it takes the OED five pages and 15,000 words to define what what means.

Words appearing only in Multi-Word-Expressions (MWEs)

"hem and haw" - [are some of these BACK constructions?] Wordnet: The verb hem and haw has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts) 1. hem and haw -- (utter `hems' and `haws'; indicated hesitation; "He hemmed and hawed when asked to address the crowd") verb haw has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts) 1. haw -- (utter `haw'; "he hemmed and hawed") verb hem has 2 senses (no senses from tagged texts) 1. hem -- (fold over and sew together to provide with a hem; "hem my skirt") 2. hem -- (utter `hem' or `ahem') "short shrift": [WN: noun short shrift has 2 senses (no senses from tagged texts) 1. short shrift, summary treatment -- (a brief and unsympathetic rejection; "they made short shrift of my request") 2. short shrift -- (brief and unsympathetic treatment) noun shrift has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts) 1. shrift -- (the act of being shriven) -- fell in "one fell swoop": [adj fell has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts) 1. barbarous, brutal, cruel, fell, roughshod, savage, vicious -- (of persons or their actions) able or disposed to inflict pain or suffering; "a barbarous crime"; "brutal beatings"; "cruel tortures"; "Stalin's roughshod treatment of the kulaks"; "a savage slap"; "vicious kicks") Adj that qualifies only one word: [e.g.: bAnglA "DAsA" - used only for guavas "DAsA peyArA"] overwhelmed: when you are overwhelmed, what is the whelm that you are over? or for that matter, when we can be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, why not semiwhelmed, or - if our feelings are less pronounced - just whelmed? [The verb whelm has 1 sense: 1. overwhelm, overpower, sweep over, whelm, overcome, overtake -- (overcome, as with emotions or perceptual stimuli)] [underwhelm - not in WN]

Richness of vocabulary

* The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinctions unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between "I wrote" and "I have written". The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. [...] English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget's Thesaurus. [...] 14 Eng Bangla Hindi Fr Ge Sp house bARi mukAn maison haus home bARi ghar maison haus casa room ghar ghar chambre zimmer casa E B H mind man dimAg brain magaj/mAthA magaz head mAThA shar tete E B I wrote likhechhi I have written likhechhi / likhe felechhi E F G B I sing je chante ich singe Ami gAi I do sing je chante ich singe Ami gAi I am singing je chante ich singe Ami gAichhi On the other hand, other languages have facilities we lack. Both French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition (respectively connaître and kennen) and knowledges that results from understanding (savoir and wissen). [...] All the Romance languages can distinguish between something that leaks into and something that leaks out of. The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky. (Wouldn't they just?) It's sgriob. And we have nothing in English to match the Danish hyge (meaning "instantly satisfying and cosy"), [...] so we must borrow the term from them or do without the sentiment. schadenfreude: "taking pleasure in the misfortune of others" ==> does this make Germans sadists? sgiomlaireachd: highland Scottish: habit of dropping in at mealtimes. ==> common habit in Scotland? [...] The Italians, as we might expect, have over 500 names for different types of macaroni. Some of these, when translated, begin to sound distinctly unappetizing, like strozzapreti, which means "strangled priests". Vermicelli means "little worms" and even spaghetti means "little strings". When you learn that muscatel in Italian means "wine with flies in it", you may conclude that the Italians are gastronomically out to lunch, so to speak, but really their names for foodstuffs are no more disgusting than the American hot dogs or those old English favourites, toad-in-the-hole, spotted dick, and faggots in gravy. [p.14] [all languages] treat other cultures in disdain: Japanese: gaijin means "stinking of foreign hair" Germans call cockroaches "Frenchmen" (?gaulois?) Czech: pimple = Hungarian (irritation) French call lice "Spaniards" English: french leave [same sense in Norwegian/Italians: leaving like an Englishman] Belgian taxi driver: a poor tipper = "un Anglais" French: "bored to death" = "to be from Birmingham" (which is actually about right) English: Dutch courage, French letters, Spanish fly, Meican carwash (leaving car out in the rain, etc.) 19th c. butt was Irish: Irish buggy = wheelbarrow, Irish confetti = bricks, * These achievements [the translation of various ancient scripts] are all the more remarkable when you consider that often they were made using the merest fragments -- of ancient Thracian, an important language spoken over a wide area until as recently as the Middle Ages, we have just twenty-five words -- and in the face of remarkable indifference on the part of the ancient Greeks and Romans, neither of whom bothered to note the details of a single other language. The Romans even allowed Etruscan, a language that had greatly contributed to their own, to be lost, so that today Etruscan writings remain tantalizingly untranslated. [p. 21] * A vital adjunct to language is the gesture, which in some cultures can almost constitute a vocabulary all its own. Modern Greek has more than seventy common gestures, ranging from the chopping off the forearm gesture, which signifies extreme displeasure, to several highly elaborate ones, such as placing the left hand on the knee, closing one eye, looking into the middle distance and wagging the free hand up and down, which means "I don't want anything to do with it". [p. 28] * And yet for all its grammatical complexity Old English is not quite as remote from modern English as it sometimes appears. Scip, bæð, bricg, and þæt might look wholly foreign but their pronunciations -- respectively "ship", "bath", "bridge", and "that" -- have not altered in a thousand years. [...] You also find that in terms of sound values Old English is a much simpler and more reliable language with every letter distinctly and invariably related to a single sound. There were none of the silent letters or phonetic inconsistencies that bedevil modern English spelling. [p. 43] * Today we have two demonstrative pronouns, this and that, but in Shakespeare's day there was a third, yon, which denoted a further distance than that. You could talk about this hat, that hat, and yon hat. Today the world survives as a colloquialism, yonder, but our speech is fractionally impoverished for its loss. (Other languages possess even further degrees of thatness. As Pei notes, "The Cree Indian language has a special that [for] things just gone out of sight, while Ilocano, a tongue of the Philippines, has three words for this referring to a visible object, a fourth for things not in view and a fifth for things that no longer exist." [Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1949, p. 251])

Thou vs. You

[...] Originally, thou was to you as in French tu is to vous. Thou signified either close familiarity or social inferiority, while you was the more impersonal and general term. In European languages to this day choosing between the two forms can present a very real social agony. As Jespersen, a Dane who appreciated these things, put it: "English has thus attained the only manner of address worthy of a nation the respects the elementary rights of each individual." [Otto Jespersen, Growth and Structure of the English Language, 1956, p. 251] [p. 56] [In Japanese, this is achieved by calling a person by his family name, you can only do it to very intimate friends or family, or to inferiors (yobisute). Japan is of course very pointedly hierarchical. ] * If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia. There is a word to decribe the state of being a woman: muliebrity. And there's a word to describe the sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis. If you harbour an urge to look through the windows of the homes you pass, there is a word for the condition: crytoscopophilia. When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of falling, there is a word for it: myoclonic jerk. If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon. [...] In English, in short, there are words for almost everything. Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too mild to lead to action. Doesn't that seem a useful term? [...] Or ugsome, a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting. [...] Our dictionaries are full of such words -- words describing the most specific of conditions, the most improbable of contingencies, the most arcane of distinctions.

Lexical Gaps

And yet there are odd gaps. We have no word for coolness corresponding to warmth. We are strangely lacking in middling terms -- words to describe with some precision the middle ground between hard and soft, near and far, big and little [bAnglA: mAjhAri, Engl: middling?]. We have a possessive impersonal its to place alongside his, hers, and their, but no equivalent impersonal pronoun to contrast with the personal whose. Thus we have to rely on inelegant constructions such as "the house whose roof" or resort to periphrasis. Ruthless was once companioned by ruth, meaning compassion. [...] But, as with many such words, one form died and another lived. Why this should be is beyond explanation. Why should we have lost demit (send away) but saved commit? Why should impede have survived while the once equally common and seemingly just as useful expede expired? No one can say. [...] It has been said that English is unique in possessing a synonym for each level of our culture: popular, literary, and scholarly -- so that we can, according to our background and cerebral attainments, rise, mount, or ascend a stairway, shrink in fear, terror, or trepidation, and think, ponder, or cogitate upon a problem. This abundance in terms is often cited as a virtue. And yet a critic could equally argue that English is an untidy and acquisitive lanugage, cluttered with a plethora of needless words. After all, do we really need fictile as a synonym for mouldable, glabrous for hairless, sternutation for sneezing? Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary. [p. 60-62] * [...] We can talk about fine art, fine gold, a fine edge, feeling fine fine hair, and a court fine and mean quite separate things. The condition of having multiple meanings is known as polysemy, and it is very common. [...] But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks like a wholly unassuming monosyllable [...] Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participal adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] 60,000 words -- the length of a short novel -- to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.

Contronyms

Sometimes, just to heighten the confusion, the same word ends up with contradictory meanings. This kind of word is called a contronym. Sanction, for example, can either signify permission to do something or a measure forbidding it to be done. Cleave can mean cut in half or stick together. [...] Something that is fast is either stuck firmly or moving quickly. [p. 62-63] * Occasionally a single root gives birth to triplets, as with cattle, chattel, and capital, hotel, hostel, and hospital, and strait, straight, and strict. There is at least one quadruplet -- jaunty, gentle, gentile, genteel, all from the Latin gentilis -- though there may be more. But the record holder is almost certainly the Latin discus, which has given us disk, disc, dish, desk, dais, and, of course, discus. (But having said that, one native Anglo-Saxon root, bear, has given birth to more than forty words, from birth to born to burden.)

Words that are extinct in the source language

* [...] We in the English-speaking world are actually sometimes better at looking after our borrowed words than the parents were. Quite a number of words that we've absorbed no longer exist in their place of birth. For instance, the French do not use nom de plume, double entendre, panache, bon viveur, legerdemain (literally "light of hand"), or R.S.V.P. for r\'epondez s'il vous plaît. (Instead they write: "Pri\`ere de r\'epondre.") The Italians do not use brio and although they do use al fresco, to them it signifies not being outside but being in prison. Many of the words we take in are so artfully anglicized that it can be a surprise to learn they are not native. Who would guess that our word puny was once the Anglo-Norman puis n\'e or that curmudgeon may once have been the French coeur m\'echant (evil heart) [...] while bankrupt was taken literally from the Italian expression banca rotta. meaning "broken bench". In the Middle Ages, when banking was evolving in Italy, transactions were conducted in open-air markets. When a banker became insolvent his bench was broken up. [...] the Gaelic sionnachuighim was knocked into shenanigan and the Amerind raugroughcan became racoon. [...] One of our more inexplicable habits is the tendency to keep the Anglo-Saxon noun but to adopt a foreign form for the adjectival form. Thus fingers are not fingerish; they are digital. Eyes are not eyeish; they are ocular. English is unique in the tendency to marry a native noun to an adopted adjective. Among other such pairs are mouth|oral, water|aquatic, house|domestic, moon|lunar, son|filial, sun|solar, town|urban. This is yet another perennial source of puzzlement for anyone learning English. Sometimes, a Latinate adjective was adopted but the native one kept as well, so that we can choose between, say, earthly and terrestrial, motherly and maternal, timely and temporal. Although English is one of the great borrowing tongues -- deriving at least half of its common words from non-Anglo-Saxon stock -- others have been even more enthusiastic in adopting foreign terms. In Armenian, only 23 per cent of the words are of native origin, while in Albanian the proportion is just 8 per cent. [p. 67-68]

Meaning drift - catachresis

Words change by doing nothing. That is, the word stays the same but the meaning changes. Surprisingly often the meaning becomes its opposite or something very like it. Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy. Brave once implied cowardice -- as indeed bravado still does. (Both come from the same source as depraved.) Crafty, not a disparaging term, originally was a word of praise, while enthusiasm, which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild abuse. Zeal has lost its original pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has not. Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once a boy, and a girl in Chaucer's day was any young person, whether male or female. Manufacture, from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite. Politician was originally a sinister word (perhaps, on second thoughts, it still is), while obsequious and notorious simply meant flexible and famous. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice. This drift of meaning, technically called catachresis, is as widespread as it is curious. Egregious once meant eminent or admirable. In the sixteenth century, for no reason we know of, it began to take on the opposite sense of badness and unworthiness [...] Now, however, it seems that people are increasingly using it in the sense not of bad or shocking, but of simply being pointless and unconstructive. [...] A word that shows just how widespread these changes can be is nice, which is first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and -- by 1769 -- pleasant and agreeable. The meaning shifted so frequently and radically that it is now often impossible to tell in what sense it was intended, as when Jane Austen wrote to a friend, "You scold me so much in a nice long letter ... which I have received from you". [p. 71-72] * What is the most common vowel in English? Would you say it is the o of hot, the a of cat, the e of red, the i of in, the u of up? In fact, it is none of these. It isn't even a standard vowel sound. It the the colourless murmur of the schwa, represented by the symbol [ə] and appearing as one or more of the vowel sounds in words without number. It is the sound of i in animal, of e in enough, of the middle o in orthodox, of the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth vowels in inspirational, and of at least one of the vowels in almost every multisyllabic word in the language. It is everywhere. [p. 77] * If there is one thing certain aboout English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently. Consider just a few: heard - beard road - broad five - give early - dearly beau - beauty steak - streak ache - moustache low - how doll - droll scour - four grieve - sieve paid - said break - speak In some languages, such as Finnish, there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between sound and spelling. A k to the Finns is always "k", and l eternally and comfortingly "l". But in English pronunciation is so various -- one might say random -- that not one of our twenty-six letters can be relied on for constancy. Either they clasp to themselves a variety of pronunciations, as with the c in race, rack, and rich, or they sulk in silence, like the b in debt, the a in bread, the second t in thistle. In combinations they become even more unruly and unpredictable, most famously in the letter cluster ough, which can be pronounced in any of eight ways -- as in through, though, thought, tough, plough, thorough, hiccough, and lough (an Irish-English word for lake or loch, pronounced roughtly as the latter). [What about cough? In Australian English hiccough is pronounced 'hiccup' -- Fred] The pronunciation possibilities are so various that probably not one English speaker in a hundred could pronounce with confidence the name of a crowlike bird called the chough. (It's chuff.) Two words in English, hegemony and phthisis, have nine pronunciations each. [p. 77-78]

Regional variations

In southern Utah, around St George, there is a pocket where people speak a peculiar dialect called (no one seems quite sure why) Dixie, whose principal characteristics are the reversal of "ar" and "or" sounds, so that a person from St George doesn't park his car in a carport, but rather porks his core in a corepart. The bright objects in the night sky are stores, while the heroine of The Wizard of Oz is Darthy. When someone leaves a door open, Dixie speakers don't say, "Where you born in a barn?" They say, "Were you barn in a born?" [p. 97] * What accounts for all the regional variations? [...] There is certainly no shortage of theories, some of which may be charitably described as being less than half-baked. [...] Robert Hendrickson in America Talk cites the interesting theory that the New York accent may come from Gaelic. The hallmark of this accent is of course the "oi" diphthong as in "thoidy-thoid" for thirty-third and "moider" for murder, and Hendrickson points out that oi appears in many Gaelic words, such as taoisach (the Irish term for prime-minister). However, there are one or two considerations that suggest this theory may need further work. First, oi is not pronounced "oy" in Gaelic; taoisach is pronounced "tea-sack". Second, there is no tradition of converting "ir" sounds to "oi" ones in Ireland, such as would result in murder becoming "moider". And third, most of the Irish immigrants to New York didn't speak Gaelic anyway. [p. 99]

Mandarin: Limited phonemic range

Every language has its quirks and all languages, for whatever reason, happily accept conventions and limitations that aren't necessarily called for. In English, for example, we don't have words like fwost or zpink or abtholve because we never normally combine those letters to make those sounds, though there's no reason why we couldn't if we wanted to. We just don't. Chinese takes this matter of self-denial to extremes, particularly in the variety of the language spoken in the capital, Peking. All Chinese dialects are monosyllabic -- which can itself be almost absurdly limiting -- but the Pekingese dialect goes a step further and demands that all words end in an "n" or "ng" sound. As a result, there are so few phonetic possibilities in Pekingese that each sound must represent on average seventy words. Just one sound, "yi", can stand for 215 separate words. Partly the Chinese get around this by using rising and falling pitches to vary the sounds fractionally, but even so in some dialects a falling "i" sound can still represent almost forty unrelated words. We use pitch in English to a small extent, as when we differentiate between "oh" and "oh?" and "oh!" but essentially we function be relying on a pleasingly diverse range of sounds. Almost everyone agrees that English possesses more sounds than almost any other language, though few agree on just how many sounds that might be. [...] the American Heritage Dictionary lists forty-five sounds for purely English terms, plus a further half dozen for foreign terms. Italian, by contrast, uses only about half as many sounds, a mere twenty-seven, while Hawaiian gets by with just thirteen. [p. 79] * A somewhat extreme example of the process is the naval shortening of forecastle to fo'c'sle, but the tendency to compress is as old as language itself. Daisy was once day's eye, shepherd was sheep herd, lord was loafward, every was everich, fortnight was fourteen-night. [...] With the disappearance of the halfpenny, the English are now denied the rich satisfaction of compressing halfpennyworth into haypth. [p. 81] [lord: from hlafweard ("loaf-ward; ensurer, guard, provider of bread"; hlaf "bread" (-> loaf) + weard "keeper, guardian, ward."). lady: from Old English hlæf-dige ("loaf-digger; kneader of bread") hlaf "bread" + -dige "maid," Sense of "woman od superior position in society" is c.1205; "woman whose manners and sensibilities befit her for high rank in society" is from 1861 ] * Just as a quick test, see if you can tell which of the following words are mispelled supercede conceed idiosyncracy concensus accomodate impressario rhythym opthalmologist diptheriea anamoly afficianado caesarian grafitti In fact, they all are. So was misspelled at the end of the preceeding paragraph. So was preceding just there. I'm sorry, I'll stop. But I trust you get the point that English can be a maddeningly difficult language to spell correctly. [...] To be fair, English does benefit from the absence of diacritical marks. These vary from language to language, but in some they play a crucial, and often confusing, role. In Hungarian, for instance, tȍke [to"ke] means capital, but töke means testicles. Szár means stem, but take away the accent and it becomes the sort of word you say when you hit your thumb with a hammer. [...] A mere 3 per cent of our words may be orthographically troublesome, but they include some doozies, as one might say. Almost any argument in defence of English spelling begins to look a trifle flimsy when you consider anomalies such as colonel, a word that clearly contains no r and yet proceeds as if it did, or ache, bury, and pretty, all of which are pronounced in ways that pay the scantest regard to their spellings, or four and forty, one of which clearly has a u and the other of which clearly doesn't. In fact, all the "four" words -- four, fourth, fourteen, twenty-four, and so on -- are spelled with a u until we get to forty when suddenly the u disappears. Why? As with most things, there are any number of reasons for all of these. Sometimes our curious spellings are simply a matter of carelessness. That is why, for instance, abdomen has an e but abdominal doesn't, why hearken has an e but hark doesn't. Colonel is perhaps the classic example of this orthographic waywardness. The word comes from the old French coronelle, which the French adapted from the Italian colonello (from which we get colonnade). When the word first came into English in the mid-sixteenth century, it was spelled with an r, but gradually the Italian spelling and pronunciation began to challenge it. For a century or more both spellings and pronunciations were common, until finally with inimitable illogic we settled on the French pronunciation and Italian spelling. The matter of the vanishing u from forty is more problematic. Chaucer spelled it with a u, as indeed did most people until the end of the seventeenth century, and some for a century or so after that. But then, as if by universal decree, it just quietly vanished. No one seems to have remarked on it at the time. [...] Usually in English we strive to preserve the old spelling at almost any cost to logicality. Take ache. The spelling seems desperately inconsistent today, as indeed it is. Up until Shakespeare's day, ache was pronounced aitch when it was a noun. As a verb, it was pronounced ake -- but also, rather sensibly, was spelled ake. This tendency to fluctuate between "ch" and "k" sounds was once fairly common. It accounts for such pairs as speech|speak, stench|stink, and stitch|stick. But ache, for reasons that defy logic, adopted the verb pronunciation and the noun spelling. [...] The Normans certainly did not hesitate to introduce changes they felt more comfortable with, such as substituting qu for cw. Had William the Conqueror been turned back at Hastings, we would spell queen as cwene. The letters z and g were introduced and the Old English þ and ð were phased out. [...] [...] When at last Anglo-Norman died out and English words rushed in to take their place in official and literary use, it sometimes happened that people adopted the spelling used in one part of the country and the pronunciation used in another. That is why we use the western English spellings for busy and bury, but give the first the London pronunciation "bizzy" and the second the Kentish pronunciation "berry". Similarly, if you've ever wondered how on earth a word spelled one could be pronounced "wun" and once could be "wunce", the answer in both cases is that Southern pronunciations attached themselves to East Midland spellings. Once they were pronounced more or less as spelled -- i.e. "oon" and "oons". Even without the intervention of the Normans, there is every reason to suppose that English spelling would have been a trifle erratic. Largely this is because for a very long time people seemed emphatically indifferent to matters of consistency in spelling. There were exceptions. As long ago as the early thirteenth century a monk named Orm was calling for a more logical and phonetic system for English spelling. (His proposals, predictably, were entirely disregarded, but they tell scholars more about the pronunciation of the period than any other surviving document.) Even so, it is true to say that most people throughout much of the history of the English language have seemed remarkably unconcerned about the niceties of spelling -- even to the point of spelling one word two ways in the same sentence, as in the description of James I by one of his courtiers, in which just eight words come between two spellings of clothes: "He was of a middle stature, more corpulent though in his clothes than in his body, yet fat enough, his cloathes being ever made larger and easie ..." Even more remarkably perhaps, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words by Robert Cawdrey, published in 1604 and often called the first English dictionary, spelled words two ways on the title page. [David Crystal, Who Cares about English Usage?, 1984, p. 204] [...] Before 1400, it was possible to tell with some precision where in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just from the spellings. By 1500, this had become all but impossible. The development that changed everything was the invention of the printing press. This brought a much-needed measure of uniformity to English spelling -- but at the same time guaranteed that we would inherit one of the most bewilderingly inconsistent spelling systems in the world. [p. 112-117] * Consider the parts of speech. In Latin, the verb has up to 120 inflections. In English it never has more than five (e.g. see, sees, saw, seeing, seen) and often gets by with just three (hit, hits, hitting). [...] According to any textbook, the present tense of the verb drive is drive. Every secondary school pupil knows that. Yet if we say, "I used to drive to work but now I don't", we are clearly using the present tense drive in the past tense sense. Equally if we say, "I will drive you to work tomorrow", we are using it in a future sense. And if we say, "I would drive if I could afford to", we are using it in a conditional sense. In fact, almost the only form of sentence in which we cannot use the present tense form for drive is, yes, the present sense. When we need to indicate an action going on right now, we must use the participial form driving. We don't say, "I drive the car now", but rather, "I'm driving the car now". Not to put too fine a point on it, the labels are largely meaningless. [p. 125] * English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminologies are based on Latin -- a language with which it has precious little in common. [...] Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But once this insane notion became established grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies. As Burchfield notes in The English Language, one authority, F. Th. Visser, found it necessary to devote 200 pages to discussing just one aspect of the present participle. That is as crazy as it is amazing. [p. 128] * Consider the curiously persistent notion that sentences should not end with a preposition. The source of the stricture, and several other equally dubious ones, was one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life both in his native England and abroad. It is to Lowth we can trace many a pedant's more treasured notions: the belief that you must say different from rather than different to or different than, the idea that two negatives make a positive, the rule that you must not say "the heaviest of the two objects", but rather, "the heavier", the distinction between shall and will, and the clearly nonsensical belief that between can only apply to two things and among to more than two. [p. 132-133] * Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say "you was" if you were referring to one person. It sounds off today, but the logic is impeccable. Was is a singular verb and were a plural one. Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer -- surprise, surprise -- is that Robert Lowth didn't like it. "I'm hurrying, are I not?" is hopelessly ungrammatical, but "I'm hurrying, aren't I?" -- merely a contraction of the same words -- is perfect English. [...] There's no inherent reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar They are because they are. Nothing illustrates the scope for prejudice in English better than the issue of a split infinitive. Some people feel ridiculously strongly about it. When the British Conservative politician Jock Bruce-Gardyne was economic secretary to the Treasury in the early 1980s, he returned unread any departmental correspondence containing a split infinitive. (It should perhaps be pointed out that a split infinitive is one in which an adverb comes between to and a verb, as in to quickly look.) I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive: 1. Because you feel the rules of English ought to conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago. 2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority of the last 200 years, even at the cost of composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted. [p. 135] * A perennial argument with dictionary makers is whether they should be prescriptive (that is, whether they should prescribe how language should be used) or descriptive (that is, merely describe how it is used without taking a position). [...] The American Heritage Dictionary, first published in 1969, instituted a panel of distinguished commentators to rule on contentious points of usage, which are discussed, often at some length, in the text. But others have been more equivocal (or prudent or spineless depending on how you view it). The revised Random House Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1987, accepts the looser meanings of most words, though often noting that the newer usage is frowned on "by many" -- a curiously timid approach that acknowledges the existence of expert opinion and yet constantly places it at a distance. [...] It even accepts kudo as a singular -- prompting a reviewer from Time magazine to ask if one instance of pathos should now be a patho. It's a fine issue. One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change. But at the same time, it seems to me, there is a case for resisting change -- at least slapdash change. [...] clarity is generally better served if we agree to observe a distinction between imply and infer, forego and forgo, fortuitous and fortunate, uninterested and disinterested, and many others. As John Ciardi observed, resistance may in the end prove futile, but at least it tests the changes and makes them prove their worth. Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian, Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarians work is never done when he gazed at those gathered loyally around him and whispered: "I am about to -- or I am going to -- die; either expression is used." [p. 136-137] * By virtue of their brevity, dictionary definitions often fail to convey the nuances of English. [...] A dictionary will tell you that tall and high mean much the same thing, but it won't explain to you that while you can apply either term to a building you can only apply tall to a person. On the strength of dictionary definitions alone a foreign visitor to your home could be excused for telling you that you have an abnormal child, that your wife's cooking is exceedingly odorous, and that your speech at a recent sales conference was laughable, and intend nothing but the warmest praise. [p. 143] * Noah Webster (1758-1843) was by all accounts a severe, correct, humourless, religious, temperate man who was not easily liked, even by other severe, religious, temperate, humourless people. [...] He credited himself with coining many words, among them demoralize, appreciation, accompaniment, ascertainable, and expenditure, which in fact had been in the language for centuries. He was also inclined to boast of learning he simply did not possess. He claimed to have mastered twenty-three languages [...] Yet, as Thomas Pyles put it, he showed "an ignorance of German which would disgrace a freshman", and his grasp of other languages was equally tenuous. [...] Pyles calls [Webster's] Dissertation on the English Language "a fascinating farrago of the soundest linguistic common sense and the most egregious poppycock". It is hard to find anyone saying a good word about him. [p. 147] * [...] This was the first of twelve volumes of the most masterly and ambitious philological exercise ever undertaken, eventually to be redubbed Oxford English Dictionary. The intention was to record every word used in English since 1150 and to trace it back through all its shifting meanings, spellings and uses to its earliest recorded appearance. There was to be at least once citation for each century of its existence and at least one for each slight change of meaning. To achieve this, almost every significant piece of English literature from the last seven and a half centuries would have to be not so much read as scoured. The man chosen to guide this enterprise was James Augustus Henry Murray (1837-1915), a Scottish-born bank clerk, schoolteacher, and self-taught philologist. He was an unlikely, and apparently somewhat reluctant, choice to take on such a daunting task. Murray, in the best tradition of British eccentrics, had a flowing white beard and liked to be photographed in a long black housecoat with a mortarboard on his head. He had eleven children, all of whom were, almost from the moment they learned the alphabet, roped into the endless business of helping sift through and alphabetize the several million slips of paper on which were recorded every twitch and burble of the language over seven centuries. The ambition of the project was so staggering that one can't help wondering if Murray really knew what he was taking on. In point of fact, it appears he didn't. He thought the whole business would take a dozen years and fill half a dozen volumes covering some 6,400 pages. In the event, the project took more than four decades and sprawled across 15,000 densely printed pages. [p. 150-151] * In Hong Kong you can find a place called the Plastic Bacon Factory. In Naples, according to the Observer, there is a sports store called Snoopy's Dribbling, while in Brussels there is a men's clothing store called Big Nuts, where on my last visit to the city it had a sign saying: "Sweat - 690 Francs". (Close inspection revealed this to be a sweatshirt.) In Japan you can drink Homo Milk or Poccari Sweat (a popular soft drink), eat some chocolate called Hand-Maid Queer-Aid, or go out and buy some Arm Free Grand Slam Muns ingwear. [...] In Yugoslavia they speak five languages. In not one of them does the [English] word stop exist, yet every stop sign in the country says just that. I bring this up to make the somewhat obvious observation that English is the most global of languages. Products are deemed to be more exciting if they carry English messages even when, as so often happens, the messages don't make a lot of sense. I have before me a Japanese eraser which says: "Mr. Friendly Quality Eraser. Mr Friendly Arrived!! He always stay near you, and steals in your mind to lead you a good situation". On the bottom of the eraser is a further message: "We are ecologically minded. This package will self-destruct in Mother Earth". It is a product that was made in Japan solely for Japanese consumers, yet there is not a word of Japanese on it. Coke cans in Japan come with the slogan "I Feel Coke & Sound Special". A correspondent of the Economist spotted a T-shirt in Tokyo that said: "O.D. On Bourgeoisie Milk Boy Milk". A shopping bag carried a picture of dancing elephants above the legend: "Elephant Family Are Happy With Us. Their Humming Makes Us Feel Happy". [...] I recently saw in a London store a jacket with bold lettering that said: "Rodeo - 100% Boys For Atomic Atlas". The jacket was made in Britain. Who by? Who for? [p. 173-174] * So how many people in the world speak English? [...] In the first place, it is not simply a matter of taking all the English-speaking countries in the world and adding up their populations. America alone has forty million people who don't speak English -- about the same as the number of people in England who do speak English. Then there is the problem of deciding whether a person is speaking English or something that is like English but is really quite a separate language. This is especially true of the many English-based creoles in the world [...] A second and rather harsher problem is whether a person speaks English or simply thinks he speaks it. I have before me a brochure from the Italian city of Urbino, which contains a dozen pages of the most gloriously baroque and impenetrable English prose, lavishly garnished with misspellings, unexpected hyphenations, and twisted grammar. A brief extract: "The integrity and thus the vitality of Urbino is no chance, but a conservation due to the factors constituted in all probability by the approximate framework of the unity of the country, the difficulty od [sic] communications, the very concentric pattern of hill sistems or the remoteness from hi-ghly developed areas, the force of the original design proposed in its construction, with the means at the disposal of the new sciences of the Renaissance, as an ideal city even". It goes on like that for a dozen pages. There is scarcely a sentence that makes even momentary sense. I daresay that if all the people in Italy who speak English were asked to put up their hands, this author's would be one of the first to fly up, but whether he can be said to speak English is, to put it charitably, moot. [p. 174-175] * [...] we have a well-practiced gift for obfuscation in the English-speaking world. According to U.S. News & World Report [27 May 1988], an unnamed American airline referred in its annual report to an "involuntary conversion of a 727". It meant that it had crashed. At least one hospital, according to The Times, has taken to describing death as a "negative patient-care outcome". The Pentagon is peerless at this sort of thing. It once described toothpicks as "wooden interdental stimulators" and tents as "frame-supported tension structures". Here is an extract from the Pentagon's Department of Food Procurement specifications for a regulation Type 2 sandwich cookie: "The cookie shall consist of two round cakes with a layer of filling between them. The weight of the cookie shall be not less than 21.5 grams and filling weight not less than 6.4 grams. The base cakes shall be uniformly baked with a color ranging from not lighter than chip 27885 or darker than chip 13711 ... The color comparisons shall be made under north sky daylight with the objects held in such a way as to avoid specular refractance." And so it runs on for fifteen densely typed pages. Every single item the Pentagon buys is similarly detailed: plastic whistles (sixteen pages), olives (seventeen pages), hot chocolate (twenty pages). [p. 184] * [...] Esperanto, devised in 1887 by a Pole named Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhoff, who lived in an area of Russia where four languages were commonly spoken. Zamenhoff spent years diligently concocting his language. Luckily he was a determined fellow because at an advanced stage in the work his father, fearing his son would be thought a spy working in code, threw all Ludovic's papers on the fire and the young Pole was forced to start again from scratch. Esperanto is considerably more polished and accessible than Volapük. It has just sixteen rules, no definite articles, no irregular endings, and no illogicalities of spelling. [...] Esperanto looks faintly like a cross between Spanish and Martian, as this brief extract, from the Book of Genesis, shows: "En la komenco, Dio kreis le cielon kaj la teron." Esperanto has one inescapable shortcoming. For all its eight million claimed speakers, it is not widely used. [p. 185-186] * [...] Many British appellations are of truly heroic proportions, like that of the World War I admiral named Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Ernle-Drax. The best ones go in for a kind of gloriously silly redundancy towards the end, as with Sir Humphrey Dodington Benedict Sherston Sherston-Baker and the truly unbeatable Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduati Tollemache-Tollemache-de Orellana-Plantagenet-Tollemache-Tollemache, a British army major who died in World War I. [...] Somewhere in Britain to this day there is a family rejoicing in the name MacGillesheatheanaich. Often, presumably for reasons of private amusement, the British pronounce their names in ways that bear almost no relation to their spelling. Leveson-Gower is "loosen gore". Marjoribanks is "marchbanks", Hiscox is "hizzko", Howick is "hoyk", Ruthven is "rivven", Zuill is "yull", Menzies is "mingiss". They find a peculiar pleasure in taking old Norman names and mashing them around until they become something altogether unique, so the Beaulieu becomes "bewley", [...] Belvoir somehow becomes "beaver", and Beaudesert turns, unfathomably, into "belzer". [...] I could go on and on. In fact, I think I will. Viscount Althorp pronounces his name "awltrop", while the rather more sensible people of Althorp, the Northamptonshire village next to the viscount's ancestral home, say "all-thorp". [...] The surname generally said to have the most pronunciations is Featherstonewaugh, which can be pronounced in any of five ways: "feather-stun-haw", "feerston-shaw", "feston-haw", "feeson-hay" or (for those in a hurry) "fan-shaw". But in fact there are two other names with five pronunciations: Coughtrey [...] and Wriotheseley, which can be "rottsly", "rittsly", "rizzli", "rithly", or "wriotheslee". The problem is so extensive, and the possibility of gaffes so omnipresent, that the BBC employs an entire pronunciation unit, a small group of dedicated orthoepists (professional pronouncers) who spend their working lives getting to grips with these illogical pronunciations so that broadcasters don't have to do it on the air. In short, there is scarcely an area of name giving in which the British don't show a kind of wayward genius. [...] Just in the City of London, an area of one square mile [...] you can find churches named St Giles Cripplegate, St Sepulchre Without Newgate, All Hallows Barking, and the practically unbeatable St Andrews-by-the-Wardrobe. But those are just their everyday names: often the full, official titles are even more breathtaking, as with The Lord Mayor's Parish Church of St Stephen Walbrook and St Swithin Londonstone, St Benet Sheerhogg and St Mary Bothall with St Laurence Pountney, which is, for all that, just one church. Equally arresting are British pub names [...] Almost any name will do if it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners -- this is a basic requirement of most British institutions -- and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal. Among the pubs that meet, and indeed exceed, these exacting standards are the Frog and Nightgown, the Bull and Spectacles, the Flying Monk, and the Crab and Gumboil. [...] The picture is further clouded by the consideration that many pub names have been corrupted over the centuries. The Pig and Whistle is said to have its roots in peg (a drinking vessel) and wassail (a festive drink). [...] The Elephant and Castle, originally a pub and now a district of London, may have been the Infanta de Castille. The Old Bull and Bush, a famous pub on Hampstead Heath, is said to come from Boulogne Boughe and to commemorate a battle in France. Some of these derivations may be fanciful, but there is solid evidence to show that the Dog and Bacon was once the Dorking Beacon, that the Cat and Fiddle was once Caterine la Fid\`ele (at least it is recorded as such in the Domesday Book), and that the Ostrich Inn in Buckinghamshire began life as the Hospice Inn. [p. 191-193,195] * [...] a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his son's birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield. [p. 200] * [...] what America does possess in abundance is a legacy of colourful names. A mere sampling: Chocolate Bayou, Dime Box, Ding Dong and Lick Skillet, Texas; ]...] Zzyzx Springs, California; Coldass Creek, Stiffknee Knob and Rabbit Shuffle, North Carolina; Bear Wallow, Mud Lick, Minnie Mousie, Eight-Eight, and Bug, Kentucky; Dull, Only, Peeled Chestnut, Defeated, and Nameless, Tennessee; [...] Why, Arizona; Dead Bastard Peak, Crazy Woman Creek, and the unsurpassable Maggie's Nipples, Wyoming. [p. 204] Bosporus, the name for the strait linking Europe to Asia, is simply the Greek translation of Oxford. The local Turks call it Karadeniz Bogazi. 206 * But the greatest outburst of prudery came in the nineteenth century when it swept through the world like a fever. It was an age when sensibilities grew so delicate that one lady was reported to have dressed her goldfish in miniature suits for the sake of propriety and a certain Madame de la Bresse left her fortune to provide clothing for the snowmen of Paris. [...] [...] Rather more plausible is the anecdote recorded in [Words and Ways of American English by Thomas Pyles] in which [Frederick] Marryat made the serious gaffe of asking a young lady if she had hurt her leg in a fall. The woman blushingly averted her gaze and told him that people did not use that word in America. "I apologized for my want of refinement, which was attributable to having been accustomed only to English society," Marryat drolly remarked, and asked the lady what was the acceptable term for "such articles". Limbs, he was told. [p. 216-217]

Contents

Chapter 1 The World's Language

discusses the place of English in the world, including both successful and unsuccessful use of the language by non-native speakers. English words and phrases have entered the vocabularies of many other languages around the world, reflecting the power that English has in the modern world. English is often the neutral language chosen for international businesses that have workers and management that speak different native languages. English language learning, therefore, is a large industry throughout the world. Bryson compares and contrasts English to other world languages and discusses the relative merits of the different ways that language is constructed. On one hand, English has a vocabulary that is significantly larger than other languages, allowing speakers to express ideas that are more precise. Chapter 2 The Dawn of Language Chapter 3 Global Language Chapter 3 Global Language Chapter 4 The First Thousand Years Bryson traces the development of English on the island of what is now the United Kingdom. Under Roman occupation, the Celtic tribes control much of the island. After the Romans leave England in A.D. 450, several Germanic tribes migrate to the island. The Angles, Jutes, and Saxons settle in England over several generations. The Angle tribe gives the future land of England its name. Compared to the Celts, who are strongly influenced by Roman culture, the Angles are uncultured and illiterate. Much of the information that modern scholars have to work with comes from the Venerable Bede, a monk who writes a book on the History of England. Many words in modern English can be traced to Celtic and Anglo Saxon roots.... Chapter 5 Where Words Come From Chapter 6 Pronunciation Chapter 7 Varieties of English Chapter 8 Spelling Chapter 9 Good English and Bad Chapter 10 Order Out of Chaos Chapter 11 Old World New World Chapter 12 English as a World Language Chapter 13 Names Chapter 14 Swearing Chapter 15 Wordplay Chapter 16 The Future of English

Review from Amazon

"Mother Tongue" was published by Penguin Books in 1990, the third book in Bill Bryson's short (ish) history of book writing. Probably better known for his travel books, Bryson has also written three books about the English Language, "Mother Tongue" being the first. Mother Tongue was well received by the general public and Bryson continued along this path with his fifth book "Made in America: An informal History of the English Language in the United States" published in 1994. Despite its general popularity, academics in the field of linguistics criticised Mother Tongue for its lack of research and high content of errors and myths. Bryson does not however present "Mother Tongue" as a reference book but as an entertaining comment on the English language, its idiosyncrasies, origins and how it evolved into becoming the mother tongue for more than 300 million people. My current OU course, English Grammar in context leading to a degree in English Language, results in the necessity for me to study a number of academic books on the subject - many of which are prescriptive and rather uninspiring. Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue is like a breath of fresh air, descriptive and lively. It will not actually help me within my course but certainly adds to its continuing interest. Bryson's light-hearted approach to the subject is clear from the outset. The rest of the world, Bryson states, "try to" speak English and "it is charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed". He then follows these opening statements with a series of anecdotal accounts of how the English language has been humorously misrepresented in various different situations and by various countries. And in this style the book continues, information commented on with tongue-in-cheek witticism supported by amusing anecdotes. The early chapters outline the development of the English language from "the dawn of language" and through "the first thousand years". English survived invasions by Romans, Vikings and Normans. "If there is one uncanny thing about the English language, it is its incredible persistence". It didn't just survive; the English language grew richer as a result. English amalgamated the invading forces languages enabling useful synonyms for existing words. Bryson then proceeds to look at the etymology of words. There are five different ways that words are formed. Words that are created in error: asparagus for example was actually a sparrow grass. Words that are adopted: shampoo for instance came from India. Words that are created: Shakespeare actually created 1,767 new words!! Words that change meaning: tell once meant count as in bank teller. Words that have something added to or subtracted from: one that a lot of Ciaoers are familiar with!! - there has been a lot of wonderful new words created in recent challenges. Among the following chapters there includes pronunciation - "If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it"; spelling - "spellings in English are so treacherous, and opportunities for flummoxing so abundant" and good and bad English - " considerations of what makes for good English or bad English are to an uncomfortably large extent matters of prejudice and conditioning". Those always keen to highlight mistakes in spelling and grammar, please take note. Bryson heads to the end of the book with some lighter topics. In the chapter on names, Bryson looks at the origins of surnames, place names, company names and even the names of pubs! The chapter on swearing is quite an eye opener. Please remember not to call a Chinese a turtle - it is the worst possible taunt you could give. Many of the current swear words in circulation have a longer lifespan than imagined - some going as far back as the 1500s. My favourite chapter has to be the penultimate one on word play. Bryson touches on palindromes, anagrams (Mother Tongue: Me tougher, not!), holorimes, clerihews (Bill Bryson was made in the USA / About the English language he had much to say / He travelled this small island taking notes / And entertained his readers with witty anecdotes). I must apologise for my poor attempts at word play, I couldn't resist. I did tell you this was my favourite chapter!!) do assure you that Bryson uses some much better examples!! Finally Bryson opines on the future of the English language. He puts forward the fear felt by many that the English Language diversity that exists will intensify and eventually become mutually incomprehensible. Bryson closes with his own concerns "not that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable". Well sixteen years on, and thankfully the differences between American English, Australian English and British English (to name but a few) are still very evident but we still all do understand each other (well most of the time). English Language, like no other, is rich and vibrant providing opportunity for such diverse use ranging from technical and scientific journals, imaginative thrilling novels to amusing perplexing word plays (the list is endless). Bryson's Mother Tongue celebrates its qualities and encourages its eccentricity. I have very little of Bryson's eloquence in writing (sigh) and do not in way do this book justice in my review. It is not a book to be uses for academic study or as a reference but it does provide an amusing insight to the English language. Even though Bryson wrote this book some sixteen years ago, his anecdotal writing does not date and will continue to entertain for many more years to come. You don't need to be a linguist or even have an interest in history to enjoy the book, just a good sense of humour!!