I’m a big fan of author Bill Bryson, who writes wonderfully readable books about the English language. This is a feat not to be under-appreciated, because language aficionados can churn out some pretty obtuse musings while employing the very tool about which they bandy. It’s like how Author-it, the software that I use to generate online help, has the lousiest online help I have ever seen. I guess it’s the phenomenon of the cobbler’s barefoot children.
Currently I’m reading Bryson’s The Mother Tongue, a book that buffers Anglo-Saxon linguistic history with fascinating factoids about English and other languages (in particular Latin, French, Welsh, and Gaelic, though random tongues like Cree, Albanian, and Korean do pop up.) Bryson ponders how English is, at core, a simpler language than others (we have one word for you; German has seven) but its flexibility causes illogical usage and pronunciation. For example, English has eight prefixes that express negation: a-, anti-, in-, il- im-, ir-, un-, non-. Yet we have flammable and inflammable, which have the same meaning. And invaluable, which means really valuable. It’s very wild, I know.
The linguistic lore flies fast and furious. Why does the word “colonel” have an R sound when pronounced? Why doesn’t low rhyme with how? If someone can be unkempt, why not kempt? While Bryson doesn’t attempt to address all of English’s idiosyncrasies, he does marry the English language with history to explain why we use many of the words that we do. For example, Viking raiders in the ninth century introduced England to words such as freckle, husband, scream, sky, dazzle, and skill. Words from other languages usually supplement rather than supplant our vocabulary (skill didn’t replace craft). This has been one of English’s strengths: The ability to absorb new words like a sponge (though our reluctance to take on German words is noted.)
Bryson shares the universal English-nerd reverence for Shakespeare, who coined around 2000 words (critic, dawn, bump, bedroom, jaded, torture, hurry, hint, obscene, gloomy) and countless phrases (flesh and blood, budge an inch, foul play, one fell swoop, to be in a pickle). What I found interesting were the Shakespearean words that failed to catch on, such as conflux, tortive, vastidity, barky and brisky — all of which appear to have found some recognition on the Internet.
All of this, and I’m only halfway through the book. I can’t wait until America is discovered.
