Book of the Month Club edition, 270 pages
English language
Published Aug. 4, 2000 by Perennial, HarperCollins.
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"More than 350 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to."
Thus begins Bill Bryson's engaging jaunt through the quirks and byways of the world's most important—and baffling—of languages. No other language has achieved such eminence, overcome such odds, inspired such majesty of thought, or caused such confusion as English.
Bryson covers the entire history of language, from the first crude murmurings of Neanderthal man thirty thousand years ago to the explosion of English as a global language in this century. We learn why island, freight, and colonel are spelled in such patently unphonetic ways, and why four has a u in it but forty does not. We discover why Noah Webster was a liar and a cheat and on occasion stooped to plagiarism, while the great Samuel Johnson was often wildly careless and inaccurate. (In his dictionary he defined garret as "the …
"More than 350 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to."
Thus begins Bill Bryson's engaging jaunt through the quirks and byways of the world's most important—and baffling—of languages. No other language has achieved such eminence, overcome such odds, inspired such majesty of thought, or caused such confusion as English.
Bryson covers the entire history of language, from the first crude murmurings of Neanderthal man thirty thousand years ago to the explosion of English as a global language in this century. We learn why island, freight, and colonel are spelled in such patently unphonetic ways, and why four has a u in it but forty does not. We discover why Noah Webster was a liar and a cheat and on occasion stooped to plagiarism, while the great Samuel Johnson was often wildly careless and inaccurate. (In his dictionary he defined garret as "the topmost room in a house" and attic as "the room above the garret.")
We learn how some of the most cherished "rules" of the English language can be traced to an eighteenth-century English clergyman who had no formal training in grammar, why one of the most prolific contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary couldn't come to the publication party (he was an inmate at a hospital for the criminally insane), and much, much more. This is a book that will, like the English language itself, amuse, delight, and occasionally astonish you.