Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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Many of the 'facts' in the book sounded suspicious so I started looking them up elsewhere and found a great many to be wrong. His next book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, is a memoir of growing up in 1950s America, featuring another appearance from his old friend Stephen Katz. Some of it just sounded wrong, like the quote from an article that says most speakers of other languages aren’t aware there is such a thing as a thesaurus. As in so many of Bryson's books, he had me at the opening page as he explored some of the perplexities of our language that native speakers negotiate almost without thought. 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.

He’s sneery enough towards the Académie Française to make me eyeroll even though I think the Académie is full of jackasses, and makes bizarre pronouncements about the French language that a quick look at the dictionary would have proved wrong. We know that the Oxford Dictionary added "twerk", "derp" and "selfie" back in 2013 (which caused quite a bit of uproar), and in June 2017 alone, there are at least 100 new words. the true story of an American lady, newly arrived in London, who opened her front door to find three burly men on the steps informing her that they were her dustmen. It can be an insect, a means of travel, a verb form of "to flee", something a fisherman ties, one of the results of a batter hitting a baseball, or something no man wants open in public.I enjoyed this part of the book the most, learning a lot about the origins of the language that was especially useful now that I live in England myself. I stopped reading, thinking I might accidentally absorb some of the "facts" and perpetuate them myself! In that way, this book is showing its age -- the chapter on online language use is, of course, conspicuously absent -- but it's got the history part down. As far as inconsistencies go, two stick with me: First Bryson tacitly identifies himself with Britain in the early part of the book, then later on as American. Well, I am glad I stuck to English over Hindi, because this is one crazy nanny - totally idiosyncratic and eccentric, just like me.

Bill Bryson turns his sharp-eyes to "The Mother Tongue" and takes us all on a fabulous journey through and overview of the intricacies of human language. I like the book, I just didn't appreciate the superior tone of somebody who is, like the rest of us, inclined to slip from time to time.Furthermore there is no preposition in any language that cannot be translated into at least three or four prepositions in English, nor are there any English prepositions that don't have numerous translations in the other language. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Unfortunately it's also a world where the Harry Potter books are "translated" for American readers, lest we be too confused by the lingo: "What's this?

For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.Just in the six counties of northern England, an area about the size of Maine, there are seventeen separate pronunciations for the word house. Overall, this was a pleasant read and is a nice complement to other books that have been written about the English language.