Bill Bryson / Mother Tongue: The English Language
Linguistics/ 250 pages/ 1990; my version Paperback (1991); bought from Waterstones for £8.99 in Plymouth, sometime 2002.
- 2 nods out of 5 -
Before he walked through the woods, before he went down under, and even before his journey around this small island of ours, there was Mother Tongue: Bryson’s historical and cultural study upon the English language.
Something as seemingly stationary as language may appear to be at odds with wandering many thousands of miles around the earth’s globe; however, Bryson’s writing style encompasses the roots of language, its pronunciation, wordplay, to that subject we all secretly love to indulge in: swearing (‘Cunt’ being frequently thrown up in Chaucer’s classic, The Canterbury Tales).
Allow me to state, that I am not a fan of linguistical knowledge: nouns and verbs still rattle my cage and confuse me. However, Bryson takes the reader, as he would a friend, gently easing him through the pages of trivia he has to offer, which include: The Great Vowel Shift, that the Australian term ‘fair dinkum’ has its roots in England, that if a standard Western keyboard was expanded to take in every Chinese ideograph it would have to be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide!, whilst in an 1890s town in California a private language was devised which caught on with the wider town in which expressions were taken from local characters (Coffee was called ‘zeese’ after the initials of a camp cook named Zachiah Clifton). I could go on, and on, and on…
Yet despite Bryson’s nice, informal and breezy tone, the book has one obvious flaw: it lags in many places. In trying to fit in all he can, Bryson has the power to overload on the trivia to the point of distraction. From time to time he pulls the cat out of the hat – such as inserting the chapter on swearing after flogging to death the history of names – but it is a trick that can only be conjured only so often. This is at serious odds with Bryson’s travel books and his magnificent A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Sitting alongside my personal Bryson favourites – notably A Walk In the Woods – Mother Tongue falls flat; it is the younger, awkward brother alongside more successful and robust siblings. It is not a recommended starter for un-initiated Bryson readers (that should be reserved for his travel writing), but perhaps for those fans who are willing to foray into the dubious world beyond the pale which includes his Troublesome Words book. Troublesome indeed!
Linguistics/ 250 pages/ 1990; my version Paperback (1991); bought from Waterstones for £8.99 in Plymouth, sometime 2002.
- 2 nods out of 5 -
Before he walked through the woods, before he went down under, and even before his journey around this small island of ours, there was Mother Tongue: Bryson’s historical and cultural study upon the English language.
Something as seemingly stationary as language may appear to be at odds with wandering many thousands of miles around the earth’s globe; however, Bryson’s writing style encompasses the roots of language, its pronunciation, wordplay, to that subject we all secretly love to indulge in: swearing (‘Cunt’ being frequently thrown up in Chaucer’s classic, The Canterbury Tales).
Allow me to state, that I am not a fan of linguistical knowledge: nouns and verbs still rattle my cage and confuse me. However, Bryson takes the reader, as he would a friend, gently easing him through the pages of trivia he has to offer, which include: The Great Vowel Shift, that the Australian term ‘fair dinkum’ has its roots in England, that if a standard Western keyboard was expanded to take in every Chinese ideograph it would have to be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide!, whilst in an 1890s town in California a private language was devised which caught on with the wider town in which expressions were taken from local characters (Coffee was called ‘zeese’ after the initials of a camp cook named Zachiah Clifton). I could go on, and on, and on…
Yet despite Bryson’s nice, informal and breezy tone, the book has one obvious flaw: it lags in many places. In trying to fit in all he can, Bryson has the power to overload on the trivia to the point of distraction. From time to time he pulls the cat out of the hat – such as inserting the chapter on swearing after flogging to death the history of names – but it is a trick that can only be conjured only so often. This is at serious odds with Bryson’s travel books and his magnificent A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Sitting alongside my personal Bryson favourites – notably A Walk In the Woods – Mother Tongue falls flat; it is the younger, awkward brother alongside more successful and robust siblings. It is not a recommended starter for un-initiated Bryson readers (that should be reserved for his travel writing), but perhaps for those fans who are willing to foray into the dubious world beyond the pale which includes his Troublesome Words book. Troublesome indeed!
