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Book: The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way
Quotes of Book: The Mother Tongue: English and
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  1. Bill Bryson _ The Mother Tongue: English and

    All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety-and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx-or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it-and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed. And yet we achieve the process effortlessly. We absorb
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  2. Bill Bryson _ The Mother Tongue: English and

    Not only were the Anglo-Saxons relatively uncultured, they were also pagan, a fact rather quaintly preserved in the names of four of our weekdays, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, which respectively commemorate the gods Tiw, Woden, and Thor, and Woden's wife, Frig. {Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, to complete the picture, take their names from Saturn, the sun, and the moon.}
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  3. Bill Bryson _ The Mother Tongue: English and

    Almost all languages change. A rare exception is written Icelandic, which has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years ago, and if Leif Ericson appeared on the streets of Reykjavik he could find his way around, allowing for certain difficulties over terms like airport and quarter-pound cheeseburger.
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  4. Bill Bryson _ The Mother Tongue: English and

    Consider the oft-quoted statement "the exception proves the rule." Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After all, how can an exception prove a rule? It can't. The answer is that an earlier meaning of prove was to test {a meaning preserved in proving ground} and with that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible-the exception tests the rule.
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  5. Bill Bryson _ The Mother Tongue: English and

    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 grammarian's work is never done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and whispered: "I am about to-or I am going to-die; either expression is used.
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  6. Bill Bryson _ The Mother Tongue: English and

    No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The New York Times once had a boss who wouldn't allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning . . . ​and so on.
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  7. Bill Bryson _ The Mother Tongue: English and

    Even Christ reputedly made a pun when He said: "Thou art Peter: upon this rock I shall build my Church." It doesn't make a lot of sense from the wordplay point of view until you realize that in ancient Greek the word for Peter and for rock was the same.
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  8. Bill Bryson _ The Mother Tongue: English and

    To a British crossword enthusiast, the clue "An important city in Czechoslovakia" instantly suggests Oslo. Why? Look at Czech{OSLO}vakia again. "A seed you put in the garage" is caraway, while "HIJKLMNO" is water because it is H-to-O or H2O
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  9. Bill Bryson _ The Mother Tongue: English and

    Before the shift house was pronounced "hoose" {it still is in Scotland}, mode was pronounced "mood," and home rhymed with "gloom," which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. {The word has nothing to do with the modern word doom, incidentally. It is related to the domes- in domestic.}
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  10. Bill Bryson _ The Mother Tongue: English and

    In 1649 the laws were tightened even further-to the extent that swearing at a parent became punishable by death.
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  11. Bill Bryson _ The Mother Tongue: English and

    More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is.
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  12. Bill Bryson _ The Mother Tongue: English and

    One of Milton's poems contains the well-known line "Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth.
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