Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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I loved "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and now I am frightened that if I knew anything whatsoever about "Everything" I would have found that that book too was filled with amusing but completely made up factoids.

That was a theory made back when cell phones still required a battery the size of an unabridged dictionary, long before the internet became such a large part of the way the world communicates, in a time when you couldn't imagine downloading a British Doctor Who or an American Stargate Atlantis to your iPod. In a more open medium like this, I am prepared to serve Bryson as he serves others, but with a little less barren pedantry. had committed 672 murders in the name of linguistic and cultural independence" (p35) is rather particular, to say the least.I did not realize it was published in 1990 until hearing "Soviet Union" mentioned in the present tense. I picked this up thinking that Bryson had, in my experience, always been entertaining, witty and informative and that this was a topic of much interest to me, so how could I go wrong? Registered office address: Unit 34 Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EF. Not only did he clearly do little by way of preparatory work for discussion of the non-English words (I think I replayed his attempt at the Irish word “geimhreadh” 3 or 4 times because it was that bizarre), but also did things like repeatedly pronounce “short-lived” with the same I in “lived” as in “live music. So he's very much a bicultural American-Brit who can see different aspects of both societies from the inside and outside, and also has a wide-ranging intellect and deft sense of humor.

This book has also been published in the UK by Penguin Books under the title Mother Tongue: The English Language. When he becomes enamored on a topic (such as the history of our houses in "At Home" or the history of our universe in "A Short History of Nearly Everything") Bryson digs up all kinds of interesting facts and stories and anecdotes and puts it all together in a delightfully interesting collection of essays. But it's hard to enjoy Bryson's jokes when you have this nagging suspicion that he's bending the truth for the sake of a snappy punchline.Overall, this was a pleasant read and is a nice complement to other books that have been written about the English language. Bryson's concluding chapters explore the origins of proper names, our propensity for wordplay, and the history of what are now considered vulgarities (although I think since Bryson wrote, what was censored in from public media in my youth is becoming more and more common). I think the lesson here is that as a linguist, I should not be reading popular writings about language. Just in the six counties of northern England, an area about the size of Maine, there are seventeen separate pronunciations for the word house. At this point, I decided I’d read some reviews to see if anyone who knows more than I do felt the same way.