The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way QUOTES

1 " These Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: they had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks. And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well articulated speech.
Other mammals have no contact between their air passages and oesophagi. They can breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of food going down the wrong way. But with Homo sapiens food and drink must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a constant risk that some will be inadvertently inhaled. In modern humans, the lowered larynx isn't in position from birth. It descends sometime between the ages of three and five months - curiously, the precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. At all events, the descended larynx explains why you can speak and your dog cannot. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

2 " If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

3 " Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

4 " People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

5 " Our word “salary” comes literally from the vulgar Latin salarium, “salt money”—the Roman soldier’s ironic term for what it would buy. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

6 " when a person says to you, “How do you do?” he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, “How do I do what?” The complexities of the English language are "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

7 " Of course, if we all spoke a common language things might work more smoothly, but there would be far less scope for amusement. In an article in Gentleman’s Quarterly in 1987, Kenneth Turan described some of the misunderstandings that have occurred during the dubbing or subtitling of American movies in Europe. In one movie where a policeman tells a motorist to pull over, the Italian translator has him asking for a sweater (i.e., a pullover). In another where a character asks if he can bring a date to the funeral, the Spanish subtitle has him asking if he can bring a fig to the funeral. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

8 " 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. There is something in that. A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity, "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

9 " The 1905 draft of a treaty between Russia and Japan, written in both French and English, treated the English control and French contrôler as synonyms when in fact the English form means “to dominate or hold power” while the French means simply “to inspect.” The treaty nearly fell apart as a result. The "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

10 " 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. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

11 " Yugoslavian hotel: “The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

12 " 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. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

13 " In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

14 " It is curious to reflect that we have computers that can effortlessly compute pi to 5,000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference between time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana or that in the English-speaking world to make up a story, to make up one’s face, and to make up after a fight are all quite separate things. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

15 " Sir Thomas More came up with absurdity, acceptance, exact, explain, and exaggerate. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

16 " If you count proper nouns, the word in English with the most varied spellings is air with a remarkable thirty-eight: Aire, ayr, heir, e’er, ere, and so on. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

17 " It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions—like trusteeship, which consists of a Nordic stem (trust), combined with a French affix (ee), married to an Old English root (ship). Other languages cannot do this. We should be proud of ourselves for our ingenuity and yet even now authorities commonly attack almost any new construction as ugly or barbaric. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

18 " No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The New York Times once had a boss who wouldn’t allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning . . . and so on. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

19 " An American going into a London department store with a shopping list consisting of vest, knickers, suspenders, jumper, and pants would in each instance be given something dramatically different from what he expected. (To wit, a British vest is an American undershirt. Our vest is their waistcoat. Their knickers are our panties. To them a jumper is a sweater, while what we call a jumper is to them a pinafore dress. Our suspenders are their braces. They don’t need suspenders to hold up their pants because to them pants are underwear and clearly you don’t need suspenders for that, so instead they employ suspenders to hold up their stockings. Is that clear?) "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

20 " I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive. 1. Because you feel that 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. "

― Bill Bryson , The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way