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English - a humorous biography

Opening with some of the hilarious ways English is used - hotels announcing that the chambermaid will be happy to "flatten your underwear" (Yugoslavia) or injunctions to "tootle the horn" when a "passenger of the foot heaves into sight" (Tokyo), the book goes on to develop the unreasonable-ness of the language (but then, which language isn't)? The point is that these attempts reflect more the power of English as a global language which make its idiosyncracies all the more visible. English is the de facto interlingua for business, not only internationally, but also in large nations with developed languages like India, or across Africa, or even in Eastern Europe. Learning English is a path to career advancement in countless nations, and teaching English is a huge business.

Bryson takes you on a roller-coaster tour, intermixed with tough quizzes. even as a father of two caesarean sons, i could not detect the mis-spelling in caesarian.

So keep your belt fastened, or you may fall ROFL!

Excerpts

More than 300 mn people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes
seems, try to.  It would be charitable to say that the results are sometimes
mixed.  Consider this hearty announcement in a Yugoslavian hotel:

   The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid.
   Turn to her straightaway.

warning in Tokyo:

   When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at
   him mlodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then
   tootle him with vigor. 1

Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy.

To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. [p. 1]

A ydycg wedi talu a dodi eich tocyn yn y golwg?
	- A sign in a Welsh parking lot. It means "Did you remember to pay?"
	  80 percent of all Welsh people do not speak Welsh.
	  e.g. Llandudno is pronounced "klan-did-no"
No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and
yet pronounced differently. Consider just a few:

	heard - beard;	road - broad;	five - give;	fillet - skillet;
	early - dearly;	beau - beauty;	steak - streak;	ache - moustache;
	low - how;	doll - droll;	scour - pour;	four - tour;
	grieve - sieve;	paid - said;	break - speak;

[	go - to;	bathe - lather;	- AM]

... most famously the letter cluster "ough" can be pronounced in any of
eight ways - as in through, though, thought, tough, plough, thorough,
hiccough and lough.

Loan words in Other tongues

contronym: Sometimes, just to heighten confusion, the same word has contradictory meanings. Sanction, for example, can either signify permission to do something or a measure forbidding it to be done.

Almost everyone in the world speaks on the telephone or the telefoon, or even, in China, the te le fung... In 1986, The Economist assembled a list of English terms that had become more or less universal. They were: Airport, hotel, telephone, bar, soda, cigarette, sport, golf, tennis, stop, O.K., weekend, jeans, know-how, sex appeal, and no problem.

... a "herkot" is what a Ukrainian goes to his barber for.

... the Italian "schiacchenze" is simply a literal rendering of the English "shake hands".

Longest words: German

Wirtschaftstreuhandgesellschaft (business trust company)
Bundesbahngestelltenwitwe (widos of federal rail employee)
Kriegsgefangenanentsch\"adigungsgesetz (law about war reparations)

Dutch company names often have 40 letters of more, e.g. Douwe Egberts
Koninlijke Tabaksfabriek-Koffiebranderijen-Theehandal Naamloze
Vennootschap (Douwe Egberts Royal tobacco factory-Coffee roasters -
Tea traders Inc.)

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined
as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and
obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by
the object of the amorance." (p.19)

Take the simple word "what" - it takes the OED five pages and 15,000
words to define what what means.

Words appearing only in Multi-Word-Expressions (MWEs)

"hem and haw" -
      [are some of these BACK constructions?]

Wordnet:
   The verb hem and haw has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts) 1. hem
   and haw -- (utter `hems' and `haws'; indicated hesitation; "He hemmed
   and hawed when asked to address the crowd")

   verb haw has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts) 1. haw -- (utter
   `haw'; "he hemmed and hawed")

   verb hem has 2 senses (no senses from tagged texts) 1. hem -- (fold
   over and sew together to provide with a hem; "hem my skirt") 2. hem --
   (utter `hem' or `ahem')

"short shrift":
[WN: noun short shrift has 2 senses (no senses from tagged texts)

1. short shrift, summary treatment -- (a brief and unsympathetic
   rejection; "they made short shrift of my request") 2. short shrift
   -- (brief and unsympathetic treatment)

   noun shrift has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
	   1. shrift -- (the act of being shriven)

--
fell in "one fell swoop":
  [adj fell has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts) 1. barbarous, brutal,
  cruel, fell, roughshod, savage, vicious -- (of persons or their actions)
  able or disposed to inflict pain or suffering; "a barbarous crime"; "brutal
  beatings"; "cruel tortures"; "Stalin's roughshod treatment of the kulaks";
  "a savage slap"; "vicious kicks")

Adj that qualifies only one word:
     [e.g.: bAnglA "DAsA" - used only for guavas "DAsA peyArA"]

overwhelmed:
when you are overwhelmed, what is the whelm that you are over?  or for
that matter, when we can be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, why not
semiwhelmed, or - if our feelings are less pronounced - just whelmed?

   [The verb whelm has 1 sense:
   1. overwhelm, overpower, sweep over, whelm, overcome, overtake --
      (overcome, as with emotions or perceptual stimuli)]
       [underwhelm - not in WN]

Richness of vocabulary

* The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available
  synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of
  distinctions unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for
  instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind
  and brain, between man and gentleman, between "I wrote" and "I have
  written". The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a
  president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful
  thinking. [...] English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only
  language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget's
  Thesaurus. [...] 14


Eng          Bangla Hindi   Fr       Ge      Sp
house        bARi   mukAn   maison   haus
home         bARi   ghar    maison   haus    casa
room         ghar   ghar    chambre  zimmer  casa

E            B              H
mind         man           dimAg
brain        magaj/mAthA   magaz
head         mAThA         shar    tete

E               B
I wrote         likhechhi
I have written  likhechhi / likhe felechhi

E               F           G           B
I sing          je chante   ich singe   Ami gAi
I do sing       je chante   ich singe   Ami gAi
I am singing    je chante   ich singe   Ami gAichhi


  On the other hand, other languages have facilities we lack. Both
  French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results
  from recognition (respectively connaître and kennen) and
  knowledges that results from understanding (savoir and
  wissen). [...] All the Romance languages can distinguish between
  something that leaks into and something that leaks out of. The
  Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist
  glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be
  outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip
  just before taking a sip of whisky. (Wouldn't they just?) It's
  sgriob. And we have nothing in English to match the Danish hyge
  (meaning "instantly satisfying and cosy"), [...] so we must borrow
  the term from them or do without the sentiment.

  schadenfreude: "taking pleasure in the misfortune of others" ==> does this
  make Germans sadists?

  sgiomlaireachd: highland Scottish: habit of dropping in at mealtimes.  ==>
  common habit in Scotland?

  [...] The Italians, as we might expect, have over 500 names for
  different types of macaroni. Some of these, when translated, begin
  to sound distinctly unappetizing, like strozzapreti, which means
  "strangled priests". Vermicelli means "little worms" and even
  spaghetti means "little strings". When you learn that muscatel in
  Italian means "wine with flies in it", you may conclude that the
  Italians are gastronomically out to lunch, so to speak, but really
  their names for foodstuffs are no more disgusting than the American
  hot dogs or those old English favourites, toad-in-the-hole, spotted
  dick, and faggots in gravy.  [p.14]

[all languages] treat other cultures in disdain:
  Japanese: gaijin means "stinking of foreign hair"
  Germans call cockroaches "Frenchmen" (?gaulois?)
  Czech: pimple = Hungarian (irritation)
  French call lice "Spaniards"
  English: french leave
	[same sense in Norwegian/Italians: leaving like an Englishman]
  Belgian taxi driver: a poor tipper = "un Anglais"
  French: "bored to death" = "to be from Birmingham" (which is actually about right)
  English: Dutch courage, French letters, Spanish fly, Meican carwash
     (leaving car out in the rain, etc.)
     19th c. butt was Irish: Irish buggy = wheelbarrow, Irish confetti =  bricks,

* These achievements [the translation of various ancient scripts] are
  all the more remarkable when you consider that often they were made
  using the merest fragments -- of ancient Thracian, an important
  language spoken over a wide area until as recently as the Middle
  Ages, we have just twenty-five words -- and in the face of
  remarkable indifference on the part of the ancient Greeks and
  Romans, neither of whom bothered to note the details of a single
  other language. The Romans even allowed Etruscan, a language that
  had greatly contributed to their own, to be lost, so that today
  Etruscan writings remain tantalizingly untranslated. [p. 21]

* A vital adjunct to language is the gesture, which in some cultures
  can almost constitute a vocabulary all its own. Modern Greek has
  more than seventy common gestures, ranging from the chopping off the
  forearm gesture, which signifies extreme displeasure, to several
  highly elaborate ones, such as placing the left hand on the knee,
  closing one eye, looking into the middle distance and wagging the
  free hand up and down, which means "I don't want anything to do with
  it". [p. 28]

* And yet for all its grammatical complexity Old English is not quite
  as remote from modern English as it sometimes appears. Scip,
  bæð, bricg, and þæt might look wholly foreign but their
  pronunciations -- respectively "ship", "bath", "bridge", and "that"
  -- have not altered in a thousand years. [...] You also find that in
  terms of sound values Old English is a much simpler and more
  reliable language with every letter distinctly and invariably
  related to a single sound. There were none of the silent letters or
  phonetic inconsistencies that bedevil modern English
  spelling. [p. 43]

* Today we have two demonstrative pronouns, this and that, but in
  Shakespeare's day there was a third, yon, which denoted a further
  distance than that. You could talk about this hat, that hat, and yon
  hat. Today the world survives as a colloquialism, yonder, but our
  speech is fractionally impoverished for its loss.

  (Other languages possess even further degrees of thatness. As Pei
  notes, "The Cree Indian language has a special that [for] things
  just gone out of sight, while Ilocano, a tongue of the Philippines,
  has three words for this referring to a visible object, a fourth for
  things not in view and a fifth for things that no longer exist."
  [Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1949, p. 251])

Thou vs. You

[...] Originally, thou was to you as in French tu is to vous. Thou
signified either close familiarity or social inferiority, while you was the
more impersonal and general term. 
In European languages to this day choosing between the two forms can
present a very real social agony. As Jespersen, a Dane who appreciated
these things, put it:

  	"English has thus attained the only manner of address
  	worthy of a nation the respects the elementary rights of
  	each individual."
		[Otto Jespersen, Growth and Structure of the English
		Language, 1956, p. 251] [p. 56]

[In Japanese, this is achieved by calling a person by his family name, you
can only do it to very intimate friends or family, or to inferiors
(yobisute).  Japan is of course very pointedly hierarchical. ]

* If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of
  your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia. There is a
  word to decribe the state of being a woman: muliebrity. And there's
  a word to describe the sudden breaking off of thought:
  aposiopesis. If you harbour an urge to look through the windows of
  the homes you pass, there is a word for the condition:
  crytoscopophilia. When you are just dropping off to sleep and you
  experience that sudden sensation of falling, there is a word for it:
  myoclonic jerk. If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on
  its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a
  circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon. [...] In
  English, in short, there are words for almost everything.

  Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take velleity, which
  describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too mild to lead to
  action. Doesn't that seem a useful term? [...] Or ugsome, a late
  medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting. [...] Our
  dictionaries are full of such words -- words describing the most
  specific of conditions, the most improbable of contingencies, the
  most arcane of distinctions.

Lexical Gaps

  And yet there are odd gaps. We have no word for coolness
  corresponding to warmth. We are strangely lacking in middling terms --
  words to describe with some precision the middle ground between hard and
  soft, near and far, big and little [bAnglA: mAjhAri, Engl: middling?]. We
  have a possessive impersonal its to place alongside his, hers, and their,
  but no equivalent impersonal pronoun to contrast with the personal
  whose. Thus we have to rely on inelegant constructions such as "the house
  whose roof" or resort to periphrasis. Ruthless was once companioned by ruth,
  meaning compassion. [...] But, as with many such words, one form died and
  another lived. Why this should be is beyond explanation. Why should we have
  lost demit (send away) but saved commit? Why should impede have survived
  while the once equally common and seemingly just as useful expede expired?
  No one can say.

  [...] It has been said that English is unique in possessing a synonym
  for each level of our culture: popular, literary, and scholarly -- so that
  we can, according to our background and cerebral attainments, rise, mount,
  or ascend a stairway, shrink in fear, terror, or trepidation, and think,
  ponder, or cogitate upon a problem. This abundance in terms is often cited
  as a virtue. And yet a critic could equally argue that English is an untidy
  and acquisitive lanugage, cluttered with a plethora of needless words. After
  all, do we really need fictile as a synonym for mouldable, glabrous for
  hairless, sternutation for sneezing? Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon
  in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor,
  then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and
  concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a
  fine vocabulary. [p. 60-62]

* [...] We can talk about fine art, fine gold, a fine edge, feeling fine
  fine hair, and a court fine and mean quite separate things. The condition of
  having multiple meanings is known as polysemy, and it is very common. [...]
  But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks like a
  wholly unassuming monosyllable [...] Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a
  verb, and 10 as a participal adjective. Its meanings are so various and
  scattered that it takes the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] 60,000 words --
  the length of a short novel -- to discuss them all. A foreigner could be
  excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.

Contronyms

  Sometimes, just to heighten the confusion, the same word ends up
  with contradictory meanings. This kind of word is called a
  contronym. Sanction, for example, can either signify permission to
  do something or a measure forbidding it to be done. Cleave can mean
  cut in half or stick together. [...] Something that is fast is
  either stuck firmly or moving quickly. [p. 62-63]

* Occasionally a single root gives birth to triplets, as with cattle,
  chattel, and capital, hotel, hostel, and hospital, and strait,
  straight, and strict. There is at least one quadruplet -- jaunty,
  gentle, gentile, genteel, all from the Latin gentilis -- though
  there may be more. But the record holder is almost certainly the
  Latin discus, which has given us disk, disc, dish, desk, dais, and,
  of course, discus. (But having said that, one native Anglo-Saxon
  root, bear, has given birth to more than forty words, from birth to
  born to burden.)

Words that are extinct in the source language

*  [...] We in the English-speaking world are actually sometimes better at
  looking after our borrowed words than the parents were. Quite a number of
  words that we've absorbed no longer exist in their place of birth. For
  instance, the French do not use nom de plume, double entendre, panache, bon
  viveur, legerdemain (literally "light of hand"), or R.S.V.P. for r\'epondez
  s'il vous plaît. (Instead they write: "Pri\`ere de r\'epondre.") The
  Italians do not use brio and although they do use al fresco, to them it
  signifies not being outside but being in prison.

  Many of the words we take in are so artfully anglicized that it can
  be a surprise to learn they are not native. Who would guess that our
  word puny was once the Anglo-Norman puis n\'e or that curmudgeon
  may once have been the French coeur m\'echant (evil heart) [...]
  while bankrupt was taken literally from the Italian expression banca
  rotta. meaning "broken bench". In the Middle Ages, when banking was
  evolving in Italy, transactions were conducted in open-air
  markets. When a banker became insolvent his bench was broken
  up. [...]  the Gaelic sionnachuighim was knocked into shenanigan and
  the Amerind raugroughcan became racoon.

  [...] One of our more inexplicable habits is the tendency to keep
  the Anglo-Saxon noun but to adopt a foreign form for the adjectival
  form. Thus fingers are not fingerish; they are digital. Eyes are not
  eyeish; they are ocular. English is unique in the tendency to marry
  a native noun to an adopted adjective. Among other such pairs are
  mouth|oral, water|aquatic, house|domestic, moon|lunar, son|filial,
  sun|solar, town|urban. This is yet another perennial source of
  puzzlement for anyone learning English. Sometimes, a Latinate
  adjective was adopted but the native one kept as well, so that we
  can choose between, say, earthly and terrestrial, motherly and
  maternal, timely and temporal.

  Although English is one of the great borrowing tongues -- deriving
  at least half of its common words from non-Anglo-Saxon stock --
  others have been even more enthusiastic in adopting foreign
  terms. In Armenian, only 23 per cent of the words are of native
  origin, while in Albanian the proportion is just 8 per cent. [p. 67-68]

Meaning drift - catachresis

  Words change by doing nothing. That is, the word stays the same but
  the meaning changes. Surprisingly often the meaning becomes its
  opposite or something very like it.

Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy. Brave once implied cowardice --
  as indeed bravado still does. (Both come from the same source as depraved.)
  Crafty, not a disparaging term, originally was a word of praise, while
  enthusiasm, which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild abuse.
  Zeal has lost its original pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has
   not.

  Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once a boy,
  and a girl in Chaucer's day was any young person, whether male or
  female. Manufacture, from the Latin root for hand, once signified
  something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite. Politician
  was originally a sinister word (perhaps, on second thoughts, it still
  is), while obsequious and notorious simply meant flexible and
  famous. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St Paul's
  Cathedral he called it amusing, awful and artificial, and meant that it
  was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.

  This drift of meaning, technically called catachresis, is as
  widespread as it is curious. Egregious once meant eminent or
  admirable. In the sixteenth century, for no reason we know of, it
  began to take on the opposite sense of badness and unworthiness
  [...]  Now, however, it seems that people are increasingly using it
  in the sense not of bad or shocking, but of simply being pointless
  and unconstructive.

  [...] A word that shows just how widespread these changes can be is
  nice, which is first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and
  foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean
  lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 400 years
  it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly,
  luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating,
  dainty, and -- by 1769 -- pleasant and agreeable. The meaning
  shifted so frequently and radically that it is now often impossible
  to tell in what sense it was intended, as when Jane Austen wrote to
  a friend, "You scold me so much in a nice long letter ... which I
  have received from you". [p. 71-72]

* What is the most common vowel in English? Would you say it is the o
  of hot, the a of cat, the e of red, the i of in, the u of up? In
  fact, it is none of these. It isn't even a standard vowel sound. It
  the the colourless murmur of the schwa, represented by the symbol
  [ə] and appearing as one or more of the vowel sounds in words
  without number. It is the sound of i in animal, of e in enough, of
  the middle o in orthodox, of the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth
  vowels in inspirational, and of at least one of the vowels in almost
  every multisyllabic word in the language. It is everywhere.  [p. 77]

* If there is one thing certain aboout English pronunciation it is
  that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in
  the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced
  differently. Consider just a few:

      heard	- beard
      road	- broad
      five	- give
      early	- dearly
      beau	- beauty
      steak	- streak
      ache	- moustache
      low	- how
      doll	- droll
      scour	- four
      grieve	- sieve
      paid	- said
      break	- speak

  In some languages, such as Finnish, there is a neat one-to-one
  correspondence between sound and spelling. A k to the Finns is
  always "k", and l eternally and comfortingly "l". But in English
  pronunciation is so various -- one might say random -- that not one
  of our twenty-six letters can be relied on for constancy. Either
  they clasp to themselves a variety of pronunciations, as with the c
  in race, rack, and rich, or they sulk in silence, like the b in
  debt, the a in bread, the second t in thistle. In combinations they
  become even more unruly and unpredictable, most famously in the
  letter cluster ough, which can be pronounced in any of eight ways --
  as in through, though, thought, tough, plough, thorough, hiccough,
  and lough (an Irish-English word for lake or loch, pronounced
  roughtly as the latter). [What about cough? In Australian English
  hiccough is pronounced 'hiccup' -- Fred] The pronunciation
  possibilities are so various that probably not one English speaker
  in a hundred could pronounce with confidence the name of a crowlike
  bird called the chough. (It's chuff.) Two words in English, hegemony
  and phthisis, have nine pronunciations each. [p. 77-78]

Regional variations

In southern Utah, around St George, there is a pocket where people
speak a peculiar dialect called (no one seems quite sure why) Dixie,
whose principal characteristics are the reversal of "ar" and "or"
sounds, so that a person from St George doesn't park his car in a
carport, but rather porks his core in a corepart. The bright objects
in the night sky are stores, while the heroine of The Wizard of Oz is
Darthy. When someone leaves a door open, Dixie speakers don't say,
"Where you born in a barn?" They say, "Were you barn in a born?"
[p. 97]

* What accounts for all the regional variations? [...] There is
  certainly no shortage of theories, some of which may be charitably
  described as being less than half-baked. [...] Robert Hendrickson in
  America Talk cites the interesting theory that the New York accent
  may come from Gaelic. The hallmark of this accent is of course the
  "oi" diphthong as in "thoidy-thoid" for thirty-third and "moider"
  for murder, and Hendrickson points out that oi appears in many
  Gaelic words, such as taoisach (the Irish term for
  prime-minister). However, there are one or two considerations that
  suggest this theory may need further work. First, oi is not
  pronounced "oy" in Gaelic; taoisach is pronounced
  "tea-sack". Second, there is no tradition of converting "ir" sounds
  to "oi" ones in Ireland, such as would result in murder becoming
  "moider". And third, most of the Irish immigrants to New York didn't
  speak Gaelic anyway. [p. 99]

Mandarin: Limited phonemic range

  Every language has its quirks and all languages, for whatever
  reason, happily accept conventions and limitations that aren't
  necessarily called for. In English, for example, we don't have words
  like fwost or zpink or abtholve because we never normally combine
  those letters to make those sounds, though there's no reason why we
  couldn't if we wanted to. We just don't. Chinese takes this matter
  of self-denial to extremes, particularly in the variety of the
  language spoken in the capital, Peking. All Chinese dialects are
  monosyllabic -- which can itself be almost absurdly limiting -- but
  the Pekingese dialect goes a step further and demands that all words
  end in an "n" or "ng" sound. As a result, there are so few phonetic
  possibilities in Pekingese that each sound must represent on average
  seventy words. Just one sound, "yi", can stand for 215 separate
  words. Partly the Chinese get around this by using rising and
  falling pitches to vary the sounds fractionally, but even so in some
  dialects a falling "i" sound can still represent almost forty
  unrelated words. We use pitch in English to a small extent, as when
  we differentiate between "oh" and "oh?" and "oh!" but essentially we
  function be relying on a pleasingly diverse range of sounds.

  Almost everyone agrees that English possesses more sounds than
  almost any other language, though few agree on just how many sounds
  that might be. [...] the American Heritage Dictionary lists
  forty-five sounds for purely English terms, plus a further half
  dozen for foreign terms. Italian, by contrast, uses only about half
  as many sounds, a mere twenty-seven, while Hawaiian gets by with
  just thirteen. [p. 79]

* A somewhat extreme example of the process is the naval shortening of
  forecastle to fo'c'sle, but the tendency to compress is as old as
  language itself. Daisy was once day's eye, shepherd was sheep herd,
  lord was loafward, every was everich, fortnight was
  fourteen-night. [...] With the disappearance of the halfpenny, the
  English are now denied the rich satisfaction of compressing
  halfpennyworth into haypth. [p. 81]

 [lord: from hlafweard ("loaf-ward; ensurer, guard, provider of bread";
   	  hlaf "bread" (-> loaf) + weard "keeper, guardian, ward.").
  lady: from Old English hlæf-dige ("loaf-digger; kneader of bread")
	  hlaf "bread" + -dige "maid,"
	Sense of "woman od superior position in society" is c.1205;
	"woman whose manners and sensibilities befit her for high rank in
		society" is from 1861 ]

* Just as a quick test, see if you can tell which of the following words
are mispelled

      supercede
      conceed
      idiosyncracy
      concensus
      accomodate
      impressario
      rhythym
      opthalmologist
      diptheriea
      anamoly
      afficianado
      caesarian
      grafitti

  In fact, they all are. So was misspelled at the end of the
  preceeding paragraph. So was preceding just there. I'm sorry,
  I'll stop. But I trust you get the point that English can be a
  maddeningly difficult language to spell correctly.

  [...] To be fair, English does benefit from the absence of
  diacritical marks. These vary from language to language, but in
  some they play a crucial, and often confusing, role. In
  Hungarian, for instance, tȍke  [to"ke] means capital, but töke means
  testicles. Szár means stem, but take away the accent and it
  becomes the sort of word you say when you hit your thumb with a
  hammer. [...]

  A mere 3 per cent of our words may be orthographically
  troublesome, but they include some doozies, as one might
  say. Almost any argument in defence of English spelling begins
  to look a trifle flimsy when you consider anomalies such as
  colonel, a word that clearly contains no r and yet proceeds as
  if it did, or ache, bury, and pretty, all of which are
  pronounced in ways that pay the scantest regard to their
  spellings, or four and forty, one of which clearly has a u and
  the other of which clearly doesn't. In fact, all the "four"
  words -- four, fourth, fourteen, twenty-four, and so on -- are
  spelled with a u until we get to forty when suddenly the u
  disappears. Why?

  As with most things, there are any number of reasons for all of
  these. Sometimes our curious spellings are simply a matter of
  carelessness. That is why, for instance, abdomen has an e but
  abdominal doesn't, why hearken has an e but hark
  doesn't. Colonel is perhaps the classic example of this
  orthographic waywardness. The word comes from the old French
  coronelle, which the French adapted from the Italian colonello
  (from which we get colonnade). When the word first came into
  English in the mid-sixteenth century, it was spelled with an r,
  but gradually the Italian spelling and pronunciation began to
  challenge it. For a century or more both spellings and
  pronunciations were common, until finally with inimitable
  illogic we settled on the French pronunciation and Italian
  spelling.

  The matter of the vanishing u from forty is more
  problematic. Chaucer spelled it with a u, as indeed did most
  people until the end of the seventeenth century, and some for a
  century or so after that. But then, as if by universal decree,
  it just quietly vanished. No one seems to have remarked on it at
  the time. [...]

  Usually in English we strive to preserve the old spelling at
  almost any cost to logicality. Take ache. The spelling seems
  desperately inconsistent today, as indeed it is. Up until
  Shakespeare's day, ache was pronounced aitch when it was a
  noun. As a verb, it was pronounced ake -- but also, rather
  sensibly, was spelled ake. This tendency to fluctuate between
  "ch" and "k" sounds was once fairly common. It accounts for such
  pairs as speech|speak, stench|stink, and stitch|stick. But ache,
  for reasons that defy logic, adopted the verb pronunciation and
  the noun spelling.

  [...] The Normans certainly did not hesitate to introduce
  changes they felt more comfortable with, such as substituting qu
  for cw. Had William the Conqueror been turned back at Hastings,
  we would spell queen as cwene. The letters z and g were
  introduced and the Old English þ and ð were phased
  out. [...]

  [...] When at last Anglo-Norman died out and English words
  rushed in to take their place in official and literary use, it
  sometimes happened that people adopted the spelling used in one
  part of the country and the pronunciation used in another. That
  is why we use the western English spellings for busy and bury,
  but give the first the London pronunciation "bizzy" and the
  second the Kentish pronunciation "berry". Similarly, if you've
  ever wondered how on earth a word spelled one could be
  pronounced "wun" and once could be "wunce", the answer in both
  cases is that Southern pronunciations attached themselves to
  East Midland spellings. Once they were pronounced more or less
  as spelled -- i.e. "oon" and "oons".

  Even without the intervention of the Normans, there is every reason to
  suppose that English spelling would have been a trifle erratic. Largely
  this is because for a very long time people seemed emphatically indifferent
  to matters of consistency in spelling. There were exceptions. As long ago
  as the early thirteenth century a monk named Orm was calling for a more
  logical and phonetic system for English spelling. (His proposals,
  predictably, were entirely disregarded, but they tell scholars more about
  the pronunciation of the period than any other surviving document.) Even
  so, it is true to say that most people throughout much of the history of
  the English language have seemed remarkably unconcerned about the niceties
  of spelling -- even to the point of spelling one word two ways in the same
  sentence, as in the description of James I by one of his courtiers, in
  which just eight words come between two spellings of clothes: "He was of a
  middle stature, more corpulent though in his clothes than in his body, yet
  fat enough, his cloathes being ever made larger and easie ..." Even more
  remarkably perhaps, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words by Robert Cawdrey,
  published in 1604 and often called the first English dictionary, spelled
  words two ways on the title page. [David Crystal, Who Cares about English
  Usage?, 1984, p. 204]

  [...] Before 1400, it was possible to tell with some precision where
  in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just from the
  spellings. By 1500, this had become all but impossible. The
  development that changed everything was the invention of the
  printing press. This brought a much-needed measure of uniformity to
  English spelling -- but at the same time guaranteed that we would
  inherit one of the most bewilderingly inconsistent spelling systems
  in the world.  [p. 112-117]

* Consider the parts of speech. In Latin, the verb has up to 120
  inflections. In English it never has more than five (e.g. see, sees,
  saw, seeing, seen) and often gets by with just three (hit, hits,
  hitting). [...] According to any textbook, the present tense of the
  verb drive is drive. Every secondary school pupil knows that. Yet if
  we say, "I used to drive to work but now I don't", we are clearly
  using the present tense drive in the past tense sense. Equally if we
  say, "I will drive you to work tomorrow", we are using it in a
  future sense. And if we say, "I would drive if I could afford to",
  we are using it in a conditional sense. In fact, almost the only
  form of sentence in which we cannot use the present tense form for
  drive is, yes, the present sense. When we need to indicate an action
  going on right now, we must use the participial form driving. We
  don't say, "I drive the car now", but rather, "I'm driving the car
  now". Not to put too fine a point on it, the labels are largely
  meaningless.  [p. 125]

* English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple
  reason that its rules and terminologies are based on Latin -- a
  language with which it has precious little in common. [...] Making
  English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play
  baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But
  once this insane notion became established grammarians found
  themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular
  arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies. As Burchfield notes in
  The English Language, one authority, F. Th. Visser, found it
  necessary to devote 200 pages to discussing just one aspect of the
  present participle. That is as crazy as it is amazing.      [p. 128]

* Consider the curiously persistent notion that sentences should not
  end with a preposition. The source of the stricture, and several
  other equally dubious ones, was one Robert Lowth, an
  eighteenth-century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A Short
  Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long
  and distressingly influential life both in his native England and
  abroad. It is to Lowth we can trace many a pedant's more treasured
  notions: the belief that you must say different from rather than
  different to or different than, the idea that two negatives make a
  positive, the rule that you must not say "the heaviest of the two
  objects", but rather, "the heavier", the distinction between shall
  and will, and the clearly nonsensical belief that between can only
  apply to two things and among to more than two.      [p. 132-133]

* Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say "you was" if you
  were referring to one person. It sounds off today, but the logic is
  impeccable. Was is a singular verb and were a plural one. Why should
  you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The
  answer -- surprise, surprise -- is that Robert Lowth didn't like
  it. "I'm hurrying, are I not?" is hopelessly ungrammatical, but "I'm
  hurrying, aren't I?" -- merely a contraction of the same words -- is
  perfect English. [...] There's no inherent reason why these things
  should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar They are
  because they are.

  Nothing illustrates the scope for prejudice in English better
  than the issue of a split infinitive. Some people feel
  ridiculously strongly about it. When the British Conservative
  politician Jock Bruce-Gardyne was economic secretary to the
  Treasury in the early 1980s, he returned unread any departmental
  correspondence containing a split infinitive. (It should perhaps
  be pointed out that a split infinitive is one in which an adverb
  comes between to and a verb, as in to quickly look.) I can think
  of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive:
         1. Because you feel the rules of English ought to conform to
            the grammatical precepts of a language that died a
            thousand years ago.
         2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of
            usage that is without the support of any recognized
            authority of the last 200 years, even at the cost of
            composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and
            patently contorted.       [p. 135]

* A perennial argument with dictionary makers is whether they should
  be prescriptive (that is, whether they should prescribe how language
  should be used) or descriptive (that is, merely describe how it is
  used without taking a position). [...] The American Heritage
  Dictionary, first published in 1969, instituted a panel of
  distinguished commentators to rule on contentious points of usage,
  which are discussed, often at some length, in the text. But others
  have been more equivocal (or prudent or spineless depending on how
  you view it). The revised Random House Dictionary of the English
  Language, published in 1987, accepts the looser meanings of most
  words, though often noting that the newer usage is frowned on "by
  many" -- a curiously timid approach that acknowledges the existence
  of expert opinion and yet constantly places it at a distance. [...]
  It even accepts kudo as a singular -- prompting a reviewer from Time
  magazine to ask if one instance of pathos should now be a patho.

It's a fine issue. One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it
is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change
in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates
of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for
centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant
and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings
into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the
path of change.

But at the same time, it seems to me, there is a case for resisting
change -- at least slapdash change. [...] clarity is generally better
served if we agree to observe a distinction between imply and infer,
forego and forgo, fortuitous and fortunate, uninterested and
disinterested, and many others. As John Ciardi observed, resistance
may in the end prove futile, but at least it tests the changes and
makes them prove their worth.

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 grammarians work is never done when
he gazed at those gathered loyally around him and whispered: "I am
about to -- or I am going to -- die; either expression is used."   [p. 136-137]

* By virtue of their brevity, dictionary definitions often fail to
  convey the nuances of English. [...] A dictionary will tell you that
  tall and high mean much the same thing, but it won't explain to you
  that while you can apply either term to a building you can only
  apply tall to a person. On the strength of dictionary definitions
  alone a foreign visitor to your home could be excused for telling
  you that you have an abnormal child, that your wife's cooking is
  exceedingly odorous, and that your speech at a recent sales
  conference was laughable, and intend nothing but the warmest
  praise.       [p. 143]

* Noah Webster (1758-1843) was by all accounts a severe, correct,
  humourless, religious, temperate man who was not easily liked, even
  by other severe, religious, temperate, humourless people. [...] He
  credited himself with coining many words, among them demoralize,
  appreciation, accompaniment, ascertainable, and expenditure, which
  in fact had been in the language for centuries. He was also inclined
  to boast of learning he simply did not possess. He claimed to have
  mastered twenty-three languages [...] Yet, as Thomas Pyles put it,
  he showed "an ignorance of German which would disgrace a freshman",
  and his grasp of other languages was equally tenuous. [...] Pyles
  calls [Webster's] Dissertation on the English Language "a
  fascinating farrago of the soundest linguistic common sense and the
  most egregious poppycock". It is hard to find anyone saying a good
  word about him.      [p. 147]

* [...] This was the first of twelve volumes of the most masterly and
  ambitious philological exercise ever undertaken, eventually to be
  redubbed Oxford English Dictionary. The intention was to record
  every word used in English since 1150 and to trace it back through
  all its shifting meanings, spellings and uses to its earliest
  recorded appearance. There was to be at least once citation for each
  century of its existence and at least one for each slight change of
  meaning. To achieve this, almost every significant piece of English
  literature from the last seven and a half centuries would have to be
  not so much read as scoured.

      The man chosen to guide this enterprise was James Augustus Henry
      Murray (1837-1915), a Scottish-born bank clerk, schoolteacher,
      and self-taught philologist. He was an unlikely, and apparently
      somewhat reluctant, choice to take on such a daunting
      task. Murray, in the best tradition of British eccentrics, had a
      flowing white beard and liked to be photographed in a long black
      housecoat with a mortarboard on his head. He had eleven
      children, all of whom were, almost from the moment they learned
      the alphabet, roped into the endless business of helping sift
      through and alphabetize the several million slips of paper on
      which were recorded every twitch and burble of the language over
      seven centuries.

      The ambition of the project was so staggering that one can't
      help wondering if Murray really knew what he was taking on. In
      point of fact, it appears he didn't. He thought the whole
      business would take a dozen years and fill half a dozen volumes
      covering some 6,400 pages. In the event, the project took more
      than four decades and sprawled across 15,000 densely printed
      pages.       [p. 150-151]

* In Hong Kong you can find a place called the Plastic Bacon
  Factory. In Naples, according to the Observer, there is a sports
  store called Snoopy's Dribbling, while in Brussels there is a men's
  clothing store called Big Nuts, where on my last visit to the city
  it had a sign saying: "Sweat - 690 Francs". (Close inspection
  revealed this to be a sweatshirt.) In Japan you can drink Homo Milk
  or Poccari Sweat (a popular soft drink), eat some chocolate called
  Hand-Maid Queer-Aid, or go out and buy some Arm Free Grand Slam Muns
  ingwear.

[...] In Yugoslavia they speak five languages. In not one of them does
the [English] word stop exist, yet every stop sign in the country says
just that.

I bring this up to make the somewhat obvious observation that English is
the most global of languages. Products are deemed to be more exciting if
they carry English messages even when, as so often happens, the messages
don't make a lot of sense. I have before me a Japanese eraser which says:
"Mr. Friendly Quality Eraser. Mr Friendly Arrived!! He always stay near
you, and steals in your mind to lead you a good situation". On the bottom
of the eraser is a further message: "We are ecologically minded. This
package will self-destruct in Mother Earth". It is a product that was made
in Japan solely for Japanese consumers, yet there is not a word of Japanese
on it. Coke cans in Japan come with the slogan "I Feel Coke & Sound
Special". A correspondent of the Economist spotted a T-shirt in Tokyo that
said: "O.D. On Bourgeoisie Milk Boy Milk". A shopping bag carried a picture
of dancing elephants above the legend: "Elephant Family Are Happy With
Us. Their Humming Makes Us Feel Happy". [...] I recently saw in a London
store a jacket with bold lettering that said: "Rodeo - 100% Boys For Atomic
Atlas". The jacket was made in Britain. Who by? Who for?      [p. 173-174]

* So how many people in the world speak English? [...] In the first
  place, it is not simply a matter of taking all the English-speaking
  countries in the world and adding up their populations. America
  alone has forty million people who don't speak English -- about the
  same as the number of people in England who do speak English.

Then there is the problem of deciding whether a person is speaking English
or something that is like English but is really quite a separate
language. This is especially true of the many English-based creoles in the
world [...]

A second and rather harsher problem is whether a person speaks English or
simply thinks he speaks it. I have before me a brochure from the Italian
city of Urbino, which contains a dozen pages of the most
gloriously baroque and impenetrable English prose, lavishly garnished
with misspellings, unexpected hyphenations, and twisted grammar. A
brief extract: "The integrity and thus the vitality of Urbino is no
chance, but a conservation due to the factors constituted in all
probability by the approximate framework of the unity of the country,
the difficulty od [sic] communications, the very concentric pattern of
hill sistems or the remoteness from hi-ghly developed areas, the force
of the original design proposed in its construction, with the means at
the disposal of the new sciences of the Renaissance, as an ideal city
even". It goes on like that for a dozen pages. There is scarcely a
sentence that makes even momentary sense. I daresay that if all the
people in Italy who speak English were asked to put up their hands,
this author's would be one of the first to fly up, but whether he can
be said to speak English is, to put it charitably, moot.      [p. 174-175]

* [...] we have a well-practiced gift for obfuscation in the
  English-speaking world. According to U.S. News & World Report [27
  May 1988], an unnamed American airline referred in its annual report
  to an "involuntary conversion of a 727". It meant that it had
  crashed. At least one hospital, according to The Times, has taken to
  describing death as a "negative patient-care outcome". The Pentagon
  is peerless at this sort of thing. It once described toothpicks as
  "wooden interdental stimulators" and tents as "frame-supported
  tension structures". Here is an extract from the Pentagon's
  Department of Food Procurement specifications for a regulation Type
  2 sandwich cookie: "The cookie shall consist of two round cakes with
  a layer of filling between them. The weight of the cookie shall be
  not less than 21.5 grams and filling weight not less than 6.4
  grams. The base cakes shall be uniformly baked with a color ranging
  from not lighter than chip 27885 or darker than chip 13711 ... The
  color comparisons shall be made under north sky daylight with the
  objects held in such a way as to avoid specular refractance." And so
  it runs on for fifteen densely typed pages. Every single item the
  Pentagon buys is similarly detailed: plastic whistles (sixteen
  pages), olives (seventeen pages), hot chocolate (twenty pages).
      [p. 184]

* [...] Esperanto, devised in 1887 by a Pole named Ludovic Lazarus
  Zamenhoff, who lived in an area of Russia where four languages were
  commonly spoken. Zamenhoff spent years diligently concocting his
  language. Luckily he was a determined fellow because at an advanced
  stage in the work his father, fearing his son would be thought a spy
  working in code, threw all Ludovic's papers on the fire and the
  young Pole was forced to start again from scratch. Esperanto is
  considerably more polished and accessible than Volapük. It has
  just sixteen rules, no definite articles, no irregular endings, and
  no illogicalities of spelling. [...] Esperanto looks faintly like a
  cross between Spanish and Martian, as this brief extract, from the
  Book of Genesis, shows: "En la komenco, Dio kreis le cielon kaj la
  teron." Esperanto has one inescapable shortcoming. For all its eight
  million claimed speakers, it is not widely used.       [p. 185-186]

* [...] Many British appellations are of truly heroic proportions,
  like that of the World War I admiral named Sir Reginald Aylmer
  Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Ernle-Drax. The best ones go in for a kind
  of gloriously silly redundancy towards the end, as with Sir Humphrey
  Dodington Benedict Sherston Sherston-Baker and the truly unbeatable
  Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduati Tollemache-Tollemache-de
  Orellana-Plantagenet-Tollemache-Tollemache, a British army major who
  died in World War I. [...] Somewhere in Britain to this day there is
  a family rejoicing in the name MacGillesheatheanaich.

      Often, presumably for reasons of private amusement, the British
      pronounce their names in ways that bear almost no relation to
      their spelling. Leveson-Gower is "loosen gore". Marjoribanks is
      "marchbanks", Hiscox is "hizzko", Howick is "hoyk", Ruthven is
      "rivven", Zuill is "yull", Menzies is "mingiss". They find a
      peculiar pleasure in taking old Norman names and mashing them
      around until they become something altogether unique, so the
      Beaulieu becomes "bewley", [...] Belvoir somehow becomes
      "beaver", and Beaudesert turns, unfathomably, into "belzer".

      [...] I could go on and on. In fact, I think I will. Viscount
      Althorp pronounces his name "awltrop", while the rather more
      sensible people of Althorp, the Northamptonshire village next to
      the viscount's ancestral home, say "all-thorp". [...] The
      surname generally said to have the most pronunciations is
      Featherstonewaugh, which can be pronounced in any of five ways:
      "feather-stun-haw", "feerston-shaw", "feston-haw", "feeson-hay"
      or (for those in a hurry) "fan-shaw". But in fact there are two
      other names with five pronunciations: Coughtrey [...] and
      Wriotheseley, which can be "rottsly", "rittsly", "rizzli",
      "rithly", or "wriotheslee".

      The problem is so extensive, and the possibility of gaffes so
      omnipresent, that the BBC employs an entire pronunciation unit,
      a small group of dedicated orthoepists (professional
      pronouncers) who spend their working lives getting to grips with
      these illogical pronunciations so that broadcasters don't have
      to do it on the air.

      In short, there is scarcely an area of name giving in which the
      British don't show a kind of wayward genius. [...] Just in the
      City of London, an area of one square mile [...] you can find
      churches named St Giles Cripplegate, St Sepulchre Without
      Newgate, All Hallows Barking, and the practically unbeatable St
      Andrews-by-the-Wardrobe. But those are just their everyday
      names: often the full, official titles are even more
      breathtaking, as with The Lord Mayor's Parish Church of St
      Stephen Walbrook and St Swithin Londonstone, St Benet Sheerhogg
      and St Mary Bothall with St Laurence Pountney, which is, for all
      that, just one church.

      Equally arresting are British pub names [...] Almost any name
      will do if it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the
      name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of
      drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the
      name should puzzle foreigners -- this is a basic requirement of
      most British institutions -- and ideally it should excite long
      and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke
      images that border on the surreal. Among the pubs that meet, and
      indeed exceed, these exacting standards are the Frog and
      Nightgown, the Bull and Spectacles, the Flying Monk, and the
      Crab and Gumboil.

      [...] The picture is further clouded by the consideration that
      many pub names have been corrupted over the centuries. The Pig
      and Whistle is said to have its roots in peg (a drinking vessel)
      and wassail (a festive drink). [...] The Elephant and Castle,
      originally a pub and now a district of London, may have been the
      Infanta de Castille. The Old Bull and Bush, a famous pub on
      Hampstead Heath, is said to come from Boulogne Boughe and to
      commemorate a battle in France. Some of these derivations may be
      fanciful, but there is solid evidence to show that the Dog and
      Bacon was once the Dorking Beacon, that the Cat and Fiddle was
      once Caterine la Fid\`ele (at least it is recorded as such in
      the Domesday Book), and that the Ostrich Inn in Buckinghamshire
      began life as the Hospice Inn.
      [p. 191-193,195]

* [...] a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved
  to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his
  son's birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be
  known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield.       [p. 200]

* [...] what America does possess in abundance is a legacy of
  colourful names. A mere sampling: Chocolate Bayou, Dime Box, Ding
  Dong and Lick Skillet, Texas; ]...] Zzyzx Springs, California;
  Coldass Creek, Stiffknee Knob and Rabbit Shuffle, North Carolina;
  Bear Wallow, Mud Lick, Minnie Mousie, Eight-Eight, and Bug,
  Kentucky; Dull, Only, Peeled Chestnut, Defeated, and Nameless,
  Tennessee; [...] Why, Arizona; Dead Bastard Peak, Crazy Woman Creek,
  and the unsurpassable Maggie's Nipples, Wyoming. [p. 204]


  Bosporus, the name for the strait linking Europe to
  Asia, is simply the Greek translation of Oxford.
  The local Turks call it Karadeniz Bogazi. 206

* But the greatest outburst of prudery came in the nineteenth century
  when it swept through the world like a fever. It was an age when
  sensibilities grew so delicate that one lady was reported to have
  dressed her goldfish in miniature suits for the sake of propriety
  and a certain Madame de la Bresse left her fortune to provide
  clothing for the snowmen of Paris. [...]

  [...] Rather more plausible is the anecdote recorded in [Words and
  Ways of American English by Thomas Pyles] in which [Frederick]
  Marryat made the serious gaffe of asking a young lady if she had
  hurt her leg in a fall. The woman blushingly averted her gaze and
  told him that people did not use that word in America. "I apologized
  for my want of refinement, which was attributable to having been
  accustomed only to English society," Marryat drolly remarked, and
  asked the lady what was the acceptable term for "such
  articles". Limbs, he was told. [p. 216-217]

Contents

Chapter 1 The World's Language

    discusses the place of English in the world, including both successful
    and unsuccessful use of the language by non-native speakers. English
    words and phrases have entered the vocabularies of many other languages
    around the world, reflecting the power that English has in the modern
    world. English is often the neutral language chosen for international
    businesses that have workers and management that speak different native
    languages. English language learning, therefore, is a large industry
    throughout the world.

    Bryson compares and contrasts English to other world languages and
    discusses the relative merits of the different ways that language is
    constructed. On one hand, English has a vocabulary that is significantly
    larger than other languages, allowing speakers to express ideas that are
    more precise.

Chapter 2 The Dawn of Language Chapter 3 Global Language
Chapter 3 Global Language

Chapter 4 The First Thousand Years
    Bryson traces the development of English on the island of what is now the
    United Kingdom. Under Roman occupation, the Celtic tribes control much of
    the island. After the Romans leave England in A.D. 450, several Germanic
    tribes migrate to the island. The Angles, Jutes, and Saxons settle in
    England over several generations. The Angle tribe gives the future land
    of England its name. Compared to the Celts, who are strongly influenced
    by Roman culture, the Angles are uncultured and illiterate. Much of the
    information that modern scholars have to work with comes from the
    Venerable Bede, a monk who writes a book on the History of England. Many
    words in modern English can be traced to Celtic and Anglo Saxon
    roots....

Chapter 5 Where Words Come From
Chapter 6 Pronunciation
Chapter 7 Varieties of English
Chapter 8 Spelling
Chapter 9 Good English and Bad
Chapter 10 Order Out of Chaos
Chapter 11 Old World New World
Chapter 12 English as a World Language
Chapter 13 Names
Chapter 14 Swearing
Chapter 15 Wordplay
Chapter 16 The Future of English

Review from Amazon

"Mother Tongue" was published by Penguin Books in 1990, the third book in
Bill Bryson's short (ish) history of book writing. Probably better known for
his travel books, Bryson has also written three books about the English
Language, "Mother Tongue" being the first. Mother Tongue was well received
by the general public and Bryson continued along this path with his fifth
book "Made in America: An informal History of the English Language in the
United States" published in 1994.

Despite its general popularity, academics in the field of linguistics
criticised Mother Tongue for its lack of research and high content of errors
and myths. Bryson does not however present "Mother Tongue" as a reference
book but as an entertaining comment on the English language, its
idiosyncrasies, origins and how it evolved into becoming the mother tongue
for more than 300 million people.  My current OU course, English Grammar in
context leading to a degree in English Language, results in the necessity for
me to study a number of academic books on the subject - many of which are
prescriptive and rather uninspiring. Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue is like a
breath of fresh air, descriptive and lively. It will not actually help me
within my course but certainly adds to its continuing interest.

Bryson's light-hearted approach to the subject is clear from the outset. The
rest of the world, Bryson states, "try to" speak English and "it is
charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed". He then follows
these opening statements with a series of anecdotal accounts of how the
English language has been humorously misrepresented in various different
situations and by various countries. And in this style the book continues,
information commented on with tongue-in-cheek witticism supported by amusing
anecdotes.  The early chapters outline the development of the English
language from "the dawn of language" and through "the first thousand
years". English survived invasions by Romans, Vikings and Normans. "If there
is one uncanny thing about the English language, it is its incredible
persistence". It didn't just survive; the English language grew richer as a
result. English amalgamated the invading forces languages enabling useful
synonyms for existing words.

Bryson then proceeds to look at the etymology of words. There are five
different ways that words are formed. Words that are created in error:
asparagus for example was actually a sparrow grass. Words that are adopted:
shampoo for instance came from India. Words that are created: Shakespeare
actually created 1,767 new words!! Words that change meaning: tell once meant
count as in bank teller. Words that have something added to or subtracted
from: one that a lot of Ciaoers are familiar with!! - there has been a lot of
wonderful new words created in recent challenges.  Among the following
chapters there includes pronunciation - "If there is one thing certain
about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain
about it"; spelling - "spellings in English are so treacherous, and
opportunities for flummoxing so abundant" and good and bad English - "
considerations of what makes for good English or bad English are to an
uncomfortably large extent matters of prejudice and conditioning". Those
always keen to highlight mistakes in spelling and grammar, please take
note.

Bryson heads to the end of the book with some lighter topics. In the
chapter on names, Bryson looks at the origins of surnames, place names,
company names and even the names of pubs!  The chapter on swearing is quite
an eye opener. Please remember not to call a Chinese a turtle - it is the
worst possible taunt you could give. Many of the current swear words in
circulation have a longer lifespan than imagined - some going as far back
as the 1500s. My favourite chapter has to be the penultimate one on word
play. Bryson touches on palindromes, anagrams (Mother Tongue: Me tougher,
not!), holorimes, clerihews (Bill Bryson was made in the USA / About the
English language he had much to say / He travelled this small island taking
notes / And entertained his readers with witty anecdotes). I must apologise
for my poor attempts at word play, I couldn't resist. I did tell you this
was my favourite chapter!!) do assure you that Bryson uses some much better
examples!!

Finally Bryson opines on the future of the English language. He puts forward
the fear felt by many that the English Language diversity that exists will
intensify and eventually become mutually incomprehensible. Bryson closes with
his own concerns "not that the various strands will drift apart but that they
will grow indistinguishable". Well sixteen years on, and thankfully the
differences between American English, Australian English and British English
(to name but a few) are still very evident but we still all do understand
each other (well most of the time).  English Language, like no other, is rich
and vibrant providing opportunity for such diverse use ranging from technical
and scientific journals, imaginative thrilling novels to amusing perplexing
word plays (the list is endless). Bryson's Mother Tongue celebrates its
qualities and encourages its eccentricity. I have very little of Bryson's
eloquence in writing (sigh) and do not in way do this book justice in my
review.

It is not a book to be uses for academic study or as a reference but it does
provide an amusing insight to the English language. Even though Bryson wrote
this book some sixteen years ago, his anecdotal writing does not date and
will continue to entertain for many more years to come. You don't need to be
a linguist or even have an interest in history to enjoy the book, just a good
sense of humour!!