Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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Or this warning to motorists in Tokyo: 'When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. The second is worse; in the chapter on American accents and dialects he starts by agreeing that the USA shows less regional variation than britain and ends suggesting that there is, in fact, one dialect per person.

Aluminium at least follows the pattern set by other chemical elements— potassium, radium, and the like. And that's a real shame, because it covers such fascinating topics, and it's so very entertainingly written.

His bestselling books include The Road to Little Dribbling, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, One Summer and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. I also didn't know that Latin evolved into French, Spanish, and Italian among other languages, to my embarrassment. I started this with enthusiasm and was enjoying his breezy style until it occurred to me that a lot of what he was saying seemed to be anecdotal. November 2021: Went ahead and removed my 4 star rating for this book, which I read and reviewed in 2006. In its first pages, Bryson reports OED editor Robert Burchfield's theory that American English and British English are drifting apart so rapidly that within two hundred years we won't be able to understand each other.

The French don’t have the breadth of vocabulary to distinguish between “man” and “gentleman”, the way English speakers do, proclaims Bryson. For all the little anecdotes and copious bits of trivia it contains, I really want to like the book more than I do.

I think I have read at least two of his works previously and he never disappoints in making me chuckled or even roaring with laughter. Bryson says in this that he had his mum sending him newspaper cuttings - that is such a lovely image. From its mongrel origins to its status as the world's most-spoken tongue; its apparent simplicity to its deceptive complexity; its vibrant swearing to its uncertain spelling and pronunciation, Bryson covers all this as well as the many curious eccentricities that make it as maddening to learn as it is flexible to use. When the first inhabitants of the continent arrived in Botany Bay in 1788 they found a world teeming with flora, fauna, and geographical features such as they had never seen. He then spouts off with a series of jokes that are so ethnocentric and condescending that, if you took them at face value, you couldn't help but feel sorry for the poor backward speakers of silly old Welsh.