Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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It can be an insect, a means of travel, a verb form of "to flee", something a fisherman ties, one of the results of a batter hitting a baseball, or something no man wants open in public. As a native English speaker who spends every day contemplating and studying other languages, I can't disagree strongly enough with a message like that. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. This book has also been published in the UK by Penguin Books under the title Mother Tongue: The English Language.

It's an excellent book, but like so many foreigners, Bryson thinks a quick tour makes him an expert on all things Australian.Or these instructions gracing a packet of convenience food from Italy: 'Besmear a backing pan, previously buttered with a good tomato sauce, and, after dispose the cannelloni, lightly distanced between them in a only couch. Ever since I learned to read, English has been my favourite language - I took to it like a duck takes to water (at least, I guess they take to it willingly, and that baby ducks are not paddled until their feathers fly by Mamma Duck to make them). So that's when the whole book fell apart for me, because if he couldn't get this part right, what other things might he have been wrong about? Then there is the matter of spelling and the role of printing and dictionaries in bring a greater if not complete uniformity to spelling--is it ax or axe, judgment or judgement (it is fascinating that the spell check in this word processor highlighted the latter of these two, and yet both are accepted with the shortened forms preferred). Bryson's concluding chapters explore the origins of proper names, our propensity for wordplay, and the history of what are now considered vulgarities (although I think since Bryson wrote, what was censored in from public media in my youth is becoming more and more common).

Equally fascinating are our various forms of wordplay, the ultimate of which must be the palindrome where a sentence says the same thing forwards and backwards (an example from the book: "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. Many of the 'facts' in the book sounded suspicious so I started looking them up elsewhere and found a great many to be wrong. If English is your mother tongue, this book will amaze and amuse you with interesting tidbits about just how our language evolved into the wonder it is. To Bryson, Welsh is "as unpronounceable as it looks", and Welsh pronunciations "rarely bear much relation to their spellings. But Bryson's Anglo-American tin ear failed to pick that up, and he took his ignorance and turned it into a cheap joke at another culture's expense.November 2021: Went ahead and removed my 4 star rating for this book, which I read and reviewed in 2006.