Reading Bill Bryson is incredibly comforting. Also, I did not know that "asparagus" was called originally known as "sparrow grass" until the name morphed over time.

although some sources indicate there's a two week break in the schedule for my dear beloved Buttercup GREENFIELDS, the information is unclear whether it starts today or tomorrow. in any case, I did merely preparatory stuff today, socking away folding bicycles in little nooks and crannies, and possibly assessing as many as half a dozen abandoned bikes in total. what can I say. developed countries have odd ideas about what constitutes "junk," and actually I'm tempted to go look up the market rate for scrap metal.

if required to self-assess, i guess the first impulse is to point out that stalking and hunting may be man's first coded instructions. we don't ever have to think about eating, scanning the horizon, producing the next generation, etc.; all this stuff is hard-wired into the brain. so, too, also, the immediate impulse to acquire a target, lock-on, and follow to whatever resolution or outcome. that's the only form of self-confession I have; the only logic or reason behind investing countless hours to a project that probably won't even reach fruition. and then there's the question of merely, why not. maybe this is madness. maybe Paul Auster has already covered aspects of detective work or surveillance, among other writers, and possibly we're all set for nothing so much as the usual set of disappointing outcomes that govern life. but possibly I'll be riding a ship out to Socotra or Rockall or possibly there'll be no major outcome at all, just a dribbling down of effort. whatever the case, I won't have to maintain boring conversation with geeky computer engineers (one just walked in; it's 11:26pm), and I can maintain my high elevated status in the absolutist, purist, non-applied world of high mathmatics, lyricism, and stalking. god, in any case I hope he leaves. is he? is he? yes, he soundlessly walked off. stupid geeks ... hahahah. irony of using goodreads noted.

instead of the major topic, then, I may be drifting instead back to the central city focus, the focus on aesthetics, the question of whether aesthetic perfection makes up for atrocities or snobbishness or whatever. I mean, what would you choose, assuming you were emperor of the world, a small, population-controlled mountain kingdom where the art was fantastic, or the vast, barbarian plains, where everyone got fed? I think in many ways if you did have absolute control over the world in this thought-experiment, you would create policies that looked after the large group of people, but you'd make special concessions for the better-developed valley kingdom. there's the Sino-Japanese situation in a nutshell.

aside from this issue, there is also the question of the fate of the Western world at large. we can accept, even as members of the Anglophone world, that our civilization has turned the corner and is clearly degenerating. whatever technological breakthroughs Google.com or Apple or Microsoft will introduce in 2020, nothing is going to overall stop the entropy, the collapse, the reversion to stricter policing. sooner or later, we're going to have to get used to continuous CCTV surveillance of all public spaces, and sooner or later some new horrific terror group is going to launch an ever greater atrocity than the ones already dreamed of. but, that being the case, we're still left with some sorts of agreement, some forms of partnership, some forms of common humanity. we may be entering a world with increasing vulgarity and crasser commercialisation, but at least there'll be touchy-feely moments too, and possibly a joint-stock operation for all. that's the spirit of spiritually-informed capitalism. that's our answer to continuous revolution.

since presumably I'm going to be losing some slight touch with this website over the next two weeks, then, I guess it doesn't completely hurt to summarize things as they were. slightly better weather means slightly more comfortable clothes. lots of bike riding is good exercise and thoughts about the origin and fate of the world don't add up to a Malraux novel, but at least even if we find evidence of shifts towards radicalisation on both the left and right, there's always the consolations of literature and self-awareness. like possibly I'm doing the worst possible thing tightening up BAE security. but a Eurocopter Dauphin passed overhead the other day, and its tail rotor, being enclosed in a fenestron, made very very little sound. so who knows? who can object?

epater les bourgeoisie epater les bourgeoisie

An older, but still topical book by Bill Bryson. The man is a treasure which ever side of the Atlantic he happens to be living on.

Bryson's specialty is mining scholarly books for trivia and distilling their main ideas into smart, funny and readable prose. Almost every paragraph in this book is composed of facts or examples. They are very good at making you stop and go "huh", and the book is hard to put down. Occasionally Bryson will stop to cite a disagreement between scholars, or disagree with them himself (at one point he entertainingly cites eight examples of from English usage books containing what are arguably errors - what we now call Skitt's Law). Almost every page has jokes: of a chemical compound that "begins methianylglutaminyl and finishes 1,913 letters later as alynalalanylthreonilarginylserase", he surmises "I daresay it would take some rubbing to get it out of the carpet". Topics covered are the origins of human language and English in particular, the shift to modern English, regional dialects and their convergence or divergence, spelling rules, non-native English speakers, swearwords and crossword puzzles. Many of the reviews on here note individual mistakes (the broken English spoken by some Amish bears no relation to Pennsylvania Dutch; Finnish does not lack swearwords; despite the many jokes about unpronounceable Welsh words, Welsh actually has simple and consistent orthography). But these are minor flaws in a masterwork of pop linguistics.

You know that whole thing, "You drive on a parkway, and park on a driveway?"

You know the one I'm talking about, the "English is Weird" list. Here. ...Because I care.

This book was basically an extended version of that. With some cussing.

I've found the other stuff by Bryson to be much more readable, which isn't to say I didn't enjoy this. I did. But sometimes his lists could have/ should have been condensed. If we can get the point and understand the concept with 3 or for examples, there's no need to give us the 30 or 40 that you've found.

Being familiar with a couple languages myself, I wondered how much less people who aren't familiar with other languages would get out of it. For instance, it's nice to know what is meant by masculine and feminine nouns. And what is meant by English grammarians being tied to Latin rules when they say you can't split an infinitive. In English an infinitive is two words: to run. In Latin: currere. It's one word. Or Spanish: correr. One word. In Croatian: trcati. One word. So, if I want to blatantly ignore this rule in English, I can. If I wanted to quickly run to the store, that's what I'd do. But I couldn't corr-quickly-er in Spanish. You know?

Stuff like this popped up all over the place, and I wondered how much more I was picking up than others in my group who only spoke English. Or how much less I picked up than those who spoke fluent Portuguese and Spanish. (Must everything in life be a contest?)

I'd learned quite a bit. Living in Haiti for quite a while, I always thought of Creole as their official language. I didn't realize Creole is a type of languages.

I thought his argument that the confusing spellings in English are actually a good thing was sound. Context clues give you a lot, but differences in spelling add to clarity. You've got two real eyes: this. If we had a completely uniform and phonetic spelling, we'd gain something, but we'd lose something as well.

I noticed Bryson make some mistakes in the book. Although, I admit after looking into a couple of them, the mistake was occasionally mine... Still it was enough to make me question greater parts of it. It's tough when that doubt creeps in.

There was a lot to pull out of this book. Good, intellectual stuff. But also things like, "The City of London once had an alley favored by prostitutes called Gropecuntlane." (p. 217) Or Chaucer used spelled a certain word found in the middle of that alley's name, "Kent." Who knows if this knowledge will ever come in handy. No doubt 15 years from now, those will be the trivial pieces I'll be able to recall learning from this book.

One of those books where you feel bereft when you turn the final page and see 'acknowledgements'; you will not want it to end. Bryson has such an easy, engaging style and this book is chock full of fascinating information. If you have any interest in linguistics, language, English (or for that matter American English) this is a wonderful accessible book for all. I really enjoyed the last two chapters (on swearing and wordplay) especially. Off to get all Bryson's other books!

If you're going to read a book on etymology, it should be this book!

But, really, you shouldn't read a whole book on etymology, because although it's interesting to start with, and you poke your wife in the side and go -oh wow, did you know the reason we pronounce "bury" as "berry" is because of people in Kent - the novelty soon wears off.

Like a fat loser trying to complete a half marathon, I did not finish this. Ultimately the history of words, and dictionaries, and the differences between US and Actual Proper English are only so energising, even with Bryson's little quips and asides, makes for limited entertainment

Great news: my reading slump is finally over! And even though it took me some time to finish it I really liked this book! I read this book because my boss, who’s American, recommended it to me, and I do not regret the purchase. It still had a few things that bothered me, mainly that some of his French examples are false (at least in 2020 French), some of the words he used to differentiate French and English, I’ve honestly never heard of... And the other thing that bothered me is that the book is almost 40 years old, which might make some of the things he said outdated. But this one is not his fault.
You can find my entire review right here: https://reviewswithsprinkles.com/2020...

Those who get their panties (or knickers if you want to go all British) in a bunch concerned that only English should be spoken in the United States would do well to be reminded that English is a minestrone, a salmagundi, a veritable smorgasbord of other languages and has been hijacking words for centuries. Our modern English has changed so much over time that it's difficult to hold it to a set of rules. Even my grammar-nerd tendencies have been put on hold after reading The Mother Tongue. Language is what it is based on those who speak it, and it evolves, taking new meanings and losing a great number of others.

Bryson lays out a magnificent amount of history, definition, contextualization, culture and pop-culture, curse words, last names, dialect relationships, malaprops, misuses, and words that have gone missing. He doesn't limit his discussion to American and British English (with various regional dialects of each). He also delves into other language evolutions (including Esperanto) and issues (like the lack of a proper dictionary for Chinese) and compares them to English. I began to feel overwhelmed with the need to keep track of so much etymology that I finally had to just let it all go and allow the book to be a source of entertainment rather than a reference book.

Bryson has tracked down reasons for some of the curious language examples in my own life. Like why people in my community lazily say moun'en, Lay'en, and Cah'enwood instead of mountain, Layton, and Cottonwood. (I loved the line "...syllables, words, sentences run together like a water color left in the rain.") Why I have always had to stop and think hard before writing a check with either the number four or forty in it. And whether one should spell it O.K., ok, okay, okey (or maybe just a nice old okey dokey).

The Mother Tongue was written before the advent of texting, social media and the use of emojis and I couldn't help analyze during each of Bryson's chapters, how these two things have influenced and changed to a high degree, the way in which we communicate now and will in the future.




*Bill Bryson takes time to tease the oft unintelligible George W Bush and Dan Quayle. Could he ever have guessed that DJT would lower the articulation bar to a subterranean level?

Twenty years from publication, some of it is probably outdated, and Bryson was never a linguist, so it isn't definitive. It's just delightful, which is why I have to read it again every decade or so.

Last reading circa 2005


Personal copy

original read: 2008

Oh goodness what an interesting read. Bill Bryson has such a way of making dense material accessible for all readers. I looked up my last name after reading this- my family were tailors. My boyfriends family were bath house bathers