The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

(Book Review)

Like "Me Talk Pretty One Day", this is another book I'm reading in preparation for graduate school in Applied Linguistics.
And, also like "Me Talk Pretty One Day", several people have told me this book has little to no carry over value into what I'm actually going to be studying. But because I'm stubborn, I read it through anyway.

I'm hoping that this book will at least get my mind thinking about language and it's complexities, and will help to ease me into the topic. And if not...well, it was a pleasant enough read, so no complaints about wasted time.

After belatedly discovering Bill Bryson, I've become a fan of his work, and have yet to find a book of his that isn't a pleasant read.
(For Bill Bryson past reviews, see:
A Walk in the Woods,
The Lost Continent,
and The Life and Times of Thunderbolt Kid .

And this book is no exception. Although the material it deals with might become dry in the hands of a lesser writer, Bryson manages to infuse with enough humor, wit, and interesting anecdotes to make this little book on the history of words more enjoyable than several novels I've read.

As the chapter headings indicate, this book covers a wide variety of topics. Everything from "The Dawn of Language" and "Where Words Come From" to "Swearing" and "Wordplay". This makes it somewhat hard to succinctly summarize, but you'll just have to take my word for it that there are plenty of fascinating tidbits of information contained within the pages.

Having spent almost the last 9 or so years teaching English as a foreign language, I've discovered through my own experience that many of the things we English speakers take for granted can present formidable challenges to speakers of other languages.
I've also discovered, through my struggles with the Japanese language, some of the differences between my own mother tongue and a foreign language.

Another theme of the book, the varieties of the English language, is something I also have some personal experience with, after interacting with the other English teachers in Japan, people from Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Trinidad, and sometimes other countries.

For example, on page 177 Bryson writes, "'to be stuffed' is distinctly rude, so that if you say at a dinner party, 'I couldn't eat another thing; I'm stuffed," an embarrassing silence will fall over the table. (You may recognize the voice of experience in this.")
Indeed I myself once committed the exact same blunder -- as I wrote about in this post here.

Nevertheless, although parts of Bryson's books were telling me things I had already figured out, the vast majority of this book was new information for me.
The history of why we pronounce words differently than they are spelled I thought was pretty interesting.
The history of the English language was really interesting as well. (And again Bryson's skill as a writer makes this stuff especially interesting in his retelling.)

The chapter on swearing, which talked about when and how some words become taboo (but oddly enough not why) was also interesting. (And this is also a topic I've -touched on before in this blog).

Other notes:
***When Bryson mocks politicians for their ineloquence, he goes after George Bush senior, and not Junior. This struck me as a bit of an odd choice, until I looked at the copyright, and noticed this book was published in 1990.

***Page 17: "In Japanese, the word for foreigner means "stinking of foreign hair."
I've never heard that one before. Of course I don't claim to know every Japanese word ever uttered. It may well be a Japanese word for foreigner, but it is certainly not the Japanese word for foreigner. (The Japanese word for foreigner is a compound word reading "outside-person".)

Of course Bryson isn't a trained expert, he's just a good writer who did a lot of research for this book. This was one mistake I caught. Hopefully there aren't too many more.

***And one last thing I found fascinating. In his chapter on wordplay, Bryson talks about the French word game called called holorime (W), a two line poem in which each line is pronounced the same but uses different words. Bryson claims that in English we have the ability to do this in English, but for some reason we rarely do.

The recent Brittney Spear's song "If You Seek Amy" (W)strikes me as a brilliant modern day example of this.
I never thought I'd be praising a Brittney Spear's song, and I know she didn't write it herself, but whoever did write the song is certainly a lot more clever than I'll ever be.

(Although as this article points out (link here) they really just ripped it off from James Joyce who wrote:

If you see kay
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him from me.

In the third line, Joyce manages to encode cunt as well. Take that, Britney )

Still original or not, it makes me angry that busy-body groups like "Parents Television Council" have nothing better to do than to harass radio stations which play this song (W).
I mean it's just silly. Anyone who has listened to the radio at all recently knows that there are any number of sexual explicit songs being played. The reason this song is being targeted is not because of the meaning, but because a number of years ago, for reasons no one can quite remember, certain people decided to make a sacred cow out of the "F-word" and now devote a lot of time and resources trying to keep it off the radio. To the point where they don't even want to allow it to be spelled. And to the point where they won't even allow the spelling of the word to be hinted at.

Really, guys, with all the problems out there in the world, this is what you're going to dedicate your energies on?

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky - The New Order of World Government

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson: Book Review (Scripted)