The Mother Tongue

...Michael Medved PBS Film Critic " . . .very inspiring...

...I doubt whether it was often enforced: it could easily have decimated the population...

...It is clearly for lack of clear thinking that Bryson writes "relations between Romans and Celts had become so close as to be, in many respects, indistinguishable...

...So we get a "dialect that many of them ill spoke anyway," "which way they are still spelled in England," "in matters linguistic," and more...

...I am glad to know that it was an American in England (like Bryson) who changed the absurd "gyrating circus" into the commonsensical "traffic circle...

...On all of these subjects Bryson has THE MOTHER TONGUE: ENGLISH & HOW IT GOT THAT WAY Bill Bryson/William Morrow & Co./270 pp...

...No harm in that, especially since the tone of the book remains consistent throughout...

...In the November 25, 1965, Times Literary Supplement, there is an apt reference to "the new American vulgarism of 'cohort' meaning 'partner.' " Summing up The Mother Tongue, I would say that, personally, I would not want Mr...

...But what kind of intellectual rigor can we expect from a Bryson who moons over the superiority of Hawaiian creole to English because the former can say "I bin go store go buy shirt" for a wish that was realized, and "I bin go store for buy shirt" for one that remained unrealized...

...but since modern descriptive linguists need The People as their authority, they cannotafford to make them emerge as age-old ignoramuses...

...Further, if you find English place names funny, and their pronunciations frequently no less so, you will be charmed to learn that there is an Okeford Fitzpaine in Dorset "which many locals pronounce—for reasons no one can begin to guess at—lippeny ockford.' " Dyed-in-the-wool puritans might profit greatly from Bryson's discussion of how "the emotional charge attached to words can change dramatically over time...

...And sometimes it is even about what it promises: about how English evolved...

...Americans found it easier to change the spellings . . . rather than the pronunciations," where rather is clearly de trop...

...there are others, real enough for most of us...

...It is also chastening to learn of the occasional eccentricities of the Oxford English Dictionary, e.g., "The OED...

...The latter mean "admitted by" and "happily for" all of us...

...Time, it would be a digression, but in a book full of digressions, what's one excursus more or less...

...Somebody had to...

...Surely, he doesn't mean everywhere in the world, but everywhere in China, because, regardless of differences in dialect, all Chinese write in the same way...

...also to check up on how "small-town America" looks these days and how it is doing...

...The pluralists and permissivists are generally to the left of center, from liberals to socialists...

...Or is German too close to English to hold out anything different enough to be worth stealing...

...True, earthly and terrestrial are more or less identical (though no one would speak of a "terrestrial paradise"), but even weak stylists distinguish between motherly, as in "a motherly woman," and maternal, as in "maternal grandfather...

...write a usage handbook for its speakers and writers...

...I left Des Moines and Iowa and the United States and the war in Vietnam and Watergate, and settled across the world...

...Bryson, moreover, has problems with style...

...So I find it fascinating to learn that "when a pause reaches four seconds, one or more of the conversationalists will invariably blurt something—a fatuous comment on the weather, a startled cry of 'Gosh, is that the time?'--rather than let the silence extend to a fifth second...

...but, even then, coyness should be avoided...

...Cussler Author, Raise the Titanic and Deep Six A Reason for Living is a new collection of short stories by George Roche, the President of Hillsdale College, about the rough-and-tumble lives of people in early-to-mid-20th century Colorado who find a reason for living in the very adversities of everyday life —whether they be crippling accidents, crime and corruption, or the pressures of imminent matrimony...

...As I suggested earlier, politics must THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 47 be factored in here...

...Foreword by an economist...

...It may again be carelessness rather than ignorance that makes him say that "the only real difference" between Serbian and Croatian lies in the different alphaWhat Is This...

...First, hopefully is not comparable to admittedly and happily...

...That sentence displays an unadmirable anacoluthon as the object switches from authors to you...

...I didn't get shot or mugged...

...These undesirable attributes show up throughout his writings...

...the exception would be a stronghold of knee-jerk liberalism, where it might be queered by its slang sense of "homosexual...

...That is fetching, frolicsome writing,with a nice feeling for statistics and style, a good eye or nose for details ("a clean pair of underpants") and a sense of humor...

...A book has yet to be written showing that most changes in language have resulted from some form of ignorance...

...Repeatedly he gives us the pleonastic "the reason is . . . because," the Gallicism intriguing for fascinating, the low-level Britishism "rather like us writing a history" (for our), persnickety for pernickety, and a dangler such as "But having said that, our native Anglo-Saxon root has given birth . . . " Or he'll list dexterous as a misspelling, whereas it is just an alternative for dextrous...

...Rips don't come much better than that...

...The book has a lot of it, as well as genuine nostalgia for America, so you must not assume it to be an exercise in condescension...

...In giving examples of bad English from our leaders (e.g., Bush, Quayle), Bryson wonders whether it isn't a "trifle harsh to ask our youngsters to master their native language when we fail to demand the same of our national leaders...

...has always insisted on -ize spellings for words such as characterize, itemize, and the like [note the redundancy in "words such as . . . and the like"!], and yet almost nowhere in England, apart from the pages of the Times newspaper (and not always there) are they observed...

...Similarly thought-provoking is that "although English is a Germanic tongue and the Germans clearly were one of the main founding groups of America, there is almost no language from which we have borrowed fewer words than German...

...Ihope," "one hopes," or "let's hope" will do nicely...

...U nfortunately for a book of this kind, Bryson commits profuse errors of sundry kinds...

...Bryson has acquired considerable linguistic erudition, embraced numerous books on his subject, and, like a true lover, revels in revelations about his beloved...

...I do not own, Bryson's first book, A Dictionary of Troublesome Words, but I do have his second one, The Lost Continent, which provides an answer, more or less...

...One is with an alphabet, such as we have, or a pictographic-ideographic system, such as the Chinese use...

...And it is no less stimulating to learn that "more than eighty spellings of Shakespeare's name have been found," and that Will kept changing the spelling himself, sometimes doing it "two ways on one document," and never spelling it "Shakespeare...

...Rather, it is remarkable that the synonymous English murder, German MOrder, and French meurtre should all contain just about the same "er" sound...

...If you have the kind of sophistication Bryson evidently has, patronization of Des Moines may be hard to resist...

...But also with a bit of journalistic cuteness that dogs the book from its opening paragraph, which I reproduce in its entirety: I come from Des Moines...

...Still, my joy is marred by that while for the correct whereas...

...Given the different hemispheres, the postman sleeps while the mailman works and vice versa...

...Less easily defended as mere carelessness (if that, in fact, is a defense) is the assertion that the "er" sound, as in herd, "appears to be unique to English...

...Thus he quotes from Robert MacNeil and Co.'s The Story of English (the most dubious of his authorities): "When his fellowship expired he was offered a rectorship . . . on condition that he married the deceased rector's daughter...

...Bryson is always at his best when singing the praises of English, e.g., "It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most successful language in the world...

...D eturning to Shakespeare, Bryson 1.1...

...It is "a two-line poem in which each line is pronounced the same but uses different words...

...But John Simon, author of Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline, is the movie critic of National Review and the drama critic of New York...

...Now and then an opinion, an evaluation, does surface...

...Thus curiously does not predicate anyone filled with curiosity...

...Also, I am a sucker for contradictions, so that nothing tickles me more than "that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail...

...Modern scholarship has established that a lost play, Cardenno or Cardenna, was enacted by Shakespeare's company, but that it was probably the work of Fletcher with the collaboration of Shakespeare, like Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen...

...And almost anyone can tell the difference between timely and temporal: Would one speak of "a timely residence on earth" or "the temporal arrival of the U.S...

...Bryson as my guide through the intricacies of the English language, but that his book is often diverting and informative about this and that...

...Bryson has evidently never heard the locutions "I went to the store and bought a shirt" and "I went to the store and tried to buy a shirt...

...whereas English has only the ambiguous "I went to the store to buy a shirt...

...It may even be that, since The Mother Tongue deals extensively (and necessarily) with differences and similarities between British and American English, language became for Bryson a way of reconciling his present with his past, of inhabiting at least verbally both his countries simultaneously by immersion in their diverse yet ultimately shared discourse...

...What I am saying is that Bill Bryson is all too often rash, careless, illogical, uninformed...

...evolve new theories about it and, perhaps, relate it to other languages in new ways...

...Thus in the very last paragraph, as Bryson drives into Des Moines again in the afternoon sunshine, he loves it: "I could see why strangers came in off the interstate looking for hamburgers and gasoline and stayed forever...

...Some of them are sheer carelessness, e.g., "The Dutch Mons is the French Bergen," where Mons, of course, is French, and Bergen Dutch...

...I wasn't once approached by a Jehovah's Witness...

...Thus flammable is a fairly recent coinage that seems to have arisen on the rear bumpers of gas trucks lest drivers in back of them, assuming inflammable to mean its opposite (in = non), be tempted to play bumper cars...

...But, hjlas, Bryson neglects the most famous holorime, attributed to the great Alfred de Vigny: Gall, amant de la reine, al/a, tour magnanime, Galamment de 1Mrne a la Tour Magne Nimes...

...Well, to listen to Bryson, "Gullah is as capable of poetry and beauty as any other language...

...I had much to be grateful for...

...S omehow it all boils down to common sense...

...18.95 John Simon THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 45 some good things to say, whether he is sensibly rehearsing the basics, making generalizations worth considering, or adducing little known but piquant oddities...

...Thus he is the master of the faulty analogy, as when he wonders whether the members of U.S...

...A French example of this form where "sense often takes a backseat to euphony" is, as quoted by Bryson, "Par le bois du Djinn, ou [sic, for oh] s'entasse de l'effroi [sic, for effroi],/ Parte...

...In Bryson's article "Confessions of a Book Tour Addict" (Washington Post, September 23, 1990), I read: "Almost all publishers provide their authors with a cohort in each city who whisks you with admirable efficiency from one interview to the next...

...most immediately" and "most complete," which are tautologies...

...For example, Bryson scoffs at those who, like The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, reject the absolute use of hopefully in a sentence such as "Hopefully the sun will come out soon" as "a misplaced modal auxiliary" and require the "clumsily passive and periphrastic . . . 'It is to be hoped that the sun will come out soon.' " And he notes that no objection is raised to other words used in "the same unattached way—admittedly, mercifully, happily, curiously, and so on...

...This fits in with a lack of fine discrimination, as in "we can choose between, say, earthly and terrestrial, motherly and maternal, timely and temporal...

...The book is a carefree account of travels with a Chevy among reminiscences and discoveries, which he sums up near the end: I visited all but ten of the lower forty-eight states and drove 13,978 miles...

...why does an Iowan, with explicable wanderlust, head, less explicably, for England...

...How splendid of the French "to havehad a law against the encroachment of foreign words since as early as 1911" and a more recent one (1975) "which introduced fines for using illegal anglicismes...

...But there is no introduction explaining where the author "comes from," though we are told whence he comes: Des Moines, where he was born, and England, where he has been living for some years, plying his journalist's trade at such reputable publications as the London Times and the Independent...

...rather, it is a failure to use it where needed...

...he is apt to be cutesy, archaic, recherche, stilted...

...Now that they're old dogs, there is no point in expecting them to learn new tricks...

...requently, however, it is logic that proves too much for Bryson...

...Is it that English is really made not in America but in England, whither Germans did not emigrate in large numbers in post-Norman times...

...And it would be comforting to know that it is mere carelessness that makes him assert "Queer is still widely used in the South in the sense of strange or odd...

...For instance, it is very good on technical terms such as polysemy, orthoepy, aphesis, hyperlect, onomastics, metaphasis, amphibology, hemiteleia, and holorime...

...We are also offered an English holorime by the British humorist Miles Kington, entitled "A Lowlands Holiday Ends in Enjoyable Inactivity": "In Ayrshire hill areas, a cruise, eh, lass?/ Inertia, hilarious, accrues, helas...

...And what are we to make of the claim that rancher was borrowed "from the Spanish rancho," when it was clearly borrowed from the Spanish ranchero...

...Short stories by a college president...

...the prescriptivists are to the right, from conservatives to reactionaries...

...This, in essence, is a restatement of Dr...

...But to make this more than a factoid, Bryson should offer an explanatory hypothesis...

...We'll probably never know for sure, though Bryson's "forever" may be a bit foolhardy...

...It is good to be reminded that "even now most of us are not always sure whether we should say dived or dove, sneaked or snuck, hove or heaved, wove or weaved, strived or strove, swelled or swollen," even if Bryson does not see fit to quell our quandary...

...New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world . . . " But if Bryson's English can be shaky, his foreign languages often seem nonexistent...

...To this, a couple of objections impose themselves...

...Again, I am delighted with Bryson's sampling of bad English from leading experts and dictionaries...

...Until somewhere in the eighteenth century all our so-called four-letter words were standard usage, whereas "in nineteenth-century England puppy and cad were highly risque...

...And back in 1649 a law was passed making "swearing at a parent . . . punishable by death...

...it too never caught on" for "it never caught on either...

...But in the very next paragraph Bryson makes "a case for resisting change...

...Come with George Roche to the shadow of Mt...

...when we eat chicken, we euphemize legs and breasts into drumsticks and white meat...

...That, however, is true of almost any language...

...Or did Germans stick together and not mingle much with other ethnic groups...

...Elsewhere he writes that, for colonel, we have illogically "settled on the French pronunciation and Italian spelling," neither of which is true...

...But these have less to do with fatigue (or inertia) of any kind than with plain ignorance...

...This is patronizing and coy...

...The ability of our people to triumph over adversity is what made this country great and George Roche reminds us of this fact...

...furthermore, cohorts means either one of the ten divisions of a Roman legion or a band united in some struggle...

...It is so used south and north and east and west...

...However, this is not, as he explains, a "misuse of the subjunctive...

...Praise from a poet, a PBS film critic, and a best-selling spy novelist...

...rr he chapter headings pretty much 1 tell the story: The World's Language, The Dawn of Language, Global Language, The First Thousand Years, Where Words Come From, Pronunciation, Varieties of English, Spelling, Good English and Bad, Order Out of Chaos, Old World, New World, English as a World Language, Names, Swearing, Wordplay, The Future of English...

...Johnson's famous "it remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure...

...But why would they be transferred...

...But Bryson is not above even simpler abuses...

...He asserts that in most European languages other than English one must say "It's the time to go to the bed," which simply isn't so—why, Slavic languages don't even have definite (or indefinite) articles...

...Shavano, where the snow piles up over the rooftops and animals howl in the night and the road is closed for the season . . . " —George Gilder Economist, Author, Microcosm "There is a weathered, homemade feeling about these stories, a feeling of remembered, rather than imagined texture...

...Or he will tell us that the peculiarities of Pennsylvania Dutch arise "from adapting English words to German syntax and idiom," and cites such mistaken examples as "What's the matter of him," where German would have mit ihm (with him), and "Come in and eat yourself," where German would say essen Sie etwas, or was (eat something...

...Often they didn't...

...Bryson cites amusing instances of how far the French will go to avoid English words, but fails to notice their inconsistency in insisting that hamburger be steak hache, wherein steak remains good and English...

...No less food for thought is Bryson's conclusion, in response to the OED's ex-editor's fear that British and American English might become mutually incomprehensible within 200 years: "If we should be worrying about anything . . . it should be . . . that they will grow indistinguishable . . . a sad, sad loss...

...And Bryson is plain wrong to define catachresis as "drift of meaning," i.e., the way words change meanings over the centuries...

...Above all, do not think that we have come a long way since then: Hollywood was banning the word dame as late as 1949...

...Something is missing here...

...As soon as I was old enough I left...

...It hardly matters to me where Bryson got his information, as long as it is novel and instructive...

...Bois du gin, ou cent tasses de Tait froid...

...admittedly does not predicate an agent full of admissions...

...Similarly, "blooming and blasted . . . were . . . considered nearly as offensive as the more venerable expletives they were meant to replace...

...I loved the bright solidity of this volume and admire it very much indeed...

...We are not told either whether he studied linguistics at a university or whether it is just his avocation...

...so, then, where is this great advantage over Polish or Portuguese or the rest...

...it is a wonder that anyone paid any attention...

...Clarity here demands parallel construction: "One is with .. . the other is with . . . " Otherwise the reader thinks that the American and Chinese ways are both subdivisions of "One," and "Two" is yet to come...

...Or did the Germans in America learn English quicker than others and jettison their words before American English might have adopted them...

...Bryson's book manages for the most part to enjoy language for its own sake, but a political bias does assert itself intermittently and sometimes contradictorily...

...But where, I ask, is creole literature...

...Cavalry...

...I still had sixty-eight dollars and a clean pair of underpants...

...That could constitute an interesting argument against scholars who would make Shakespeare out to be a devout Christian, but Bryson does not pursue the matter...

...they do not contain a -fully that presupposes an agent full of the quality in question: hope, mercy, etc...

...He appeals to clarity and quotes John Ciardi to the effect that "resistance may in the end prove futile, but at least it tests the changes and makes them prove their worth...

...re Mother Tongue grew out of ariously placed journalistic pieces, their provenance ranging from the language quarterly Verbatim to the TWA Ambassador magazine...

...And something else: Did you notice that ampersand in the subtitle...

...Equally worrisome, though not related to language, is Bryson's categorical statement that two of Shakespeare's plays, Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won "have been lost to us forever...

...He tells us that as a kid he watched a documentary on television about filmmaking in Europe and fell in love with it—Europe, not filmmaking...

...English, an organization opposing bilingualism in our schools, etc., "would be so enthusiastic about language regulations if they were transferred to Quebec and found their own language effectively outlawed...

...Or take this well-taken point: "A rich vocabulary carries with it the danger of verbosity, as evidenced by our peculiar [English] affection for redundant phrases, expressions that say something twice: beck and call, law and order, assault and battery, null and void . . . " etc., etc...

...I saw pretty much everything I wanted to see and a good deal that I didn't...

...but promptly we are back with facts and figures and stories and bits of history, and how many words for snow do the Eskimos have, and how do people in different languages curse—except in those in which, sad to say, there are no cursewords—and it's all fun and games again...

...Second, there is no need except in the most formal context for "it is to be hoped...

...It is not to be found even in J. A. Cuddon's excellent Dictionary of Literary Terms...

...I think ampersands in titles are cutesy and bad news...

...So we still haven't our answer to why Bryson had to escape all the way to England...

...Fred Chapped Poet, First and Last Words "As fiction writing, this work is deceptively simple—a plain, earthy guts-and-whiskey surface that only hints at the spiritual punch and resonance that the stories achieve...

...I am astounded to learn that "an analysis of speech at the Bell Telephone Laboratories . . . detected more than ninety separate sounds just for the letter t," and would like to learn how some of the other phonemes (or telephonemes) made out...

...As many have argued—and none more strikingly than Roger Scruton—the acrimony about language, about usage, about prescriptiveness versus descriptiveness, permissiveness versus standards (what some would call elitism), has a political basis...

...It is no less titillating (I'll try to use that word more often in phone conversations: if the Bell people are still counting, we might hit a hundred) to read that "just in thesix counties of northern England, an area about the size of Maine, there are seventeen separate pronunciations of the word house," which rightly leads Bryson to considerations climaxing in a quotation from Shaw: "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him...

...And a couple of paragraphs further on, after evoking the complicatedness of Chinese, Bryson declares, "However, Chinese writing possesses one great advantage over other languages: It can be read everywhere...

...The car didn't break down...

...Romans and Celts can, but they are not the subject of the sentence...

...That last one is a French technical term for something I have long known without being able to name it...

...He just isn't cosmopolitan enough...

...And that's another occasion on which I wouldn't want Bryson as my guide: on a great-hearted walk from the Arena to the Magne Tower in Nimes...

...Hence the conclusion, shared by many, if not most, linguists that "creoles are not in any way inferior...

...It is written by a journalist rather than a linguist, a lover rather than an expert, which may be all to the good...

...Again, Bryson declares that "mental fatigue . . . left us with two forms meaning the same thing," and cites a number of examples, e.g., gather and forgather, fervid and perfervid, ravel and unravel, flammable and inflammable...

...It is under that last rubric that I find him most valuable: good collector that he is, he has quite a collection to regale you with...

...Near the start of The Lost Continent we read: "I couldn't help but agree with her—said by a lot of people but still a tautology: a conflation of "I couldn't help agreeing" and "I could not but agree...

...The book is mostly descriptive and permissive, whereas I hold with the prescriptive and elitist...

...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990...

...but it is a mite disheartening that our critic can be sloppy in the process of criticizing others...

...And what about the "two ways of rendering speech into writing...

...Consider also: "Equally, they want to watch TV," where similarly or likewise is called for...

...Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way has a little of each category about it, which need not be a bad thing...

...Ordering Information By special arrangement with Regnery Gateway, A Reason for Living, by George Roche $14.95 cloth ($3.00 off the list price) Visa/MasterCard orders, call: 1-800-887-4247 Free shipping...

...gather curiosities and anecdotes about it, and play verbal games with it...

...Rightly he observes that this should read "on condition that he marry...

...It is a populist who writes that change in usage, grammar, meaning is "a natural process," to interfere with which "is arguably both arrogant and futile," since it will prevail "no matter how many authorities hurl themselves in the path of change...

...What is lacking, by and large, is a point of view...

...To order by mail: Freedom Library Hillsdale College Hillsdale, MI 49242 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 bets they use...

...When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever, or you spend your adolescence moaning at length what a dump it is and how you can't wait to get out, and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever...

...Fine, you sentimental egalitarian, show me some...

...In it, Bryson, not quite so young any more, tells about how he fulfilled his desire "to go back to the magic places of [his] youth . . . and see if they were as good" as he remembered them...

...Actually, as any dictionary would tell him, catachresis means either the improper use of a word or a far-fetched trope...

...Language is simply a safer arena to contend in than politics, a less perilous frontier than the barricades...

...Neither were the various Hispanics who elected to come here...

...But our leaders, too, were youngsters once, and if good English had been taught them and demanded of them, it would have followed them to high places...

...Actually, it is not so much about English as it is about English and other languages and language in general, which is fine with me...

...Would not both these statements, and Ciardi's in particular, suggest that if the opposition were strong enough, certain changes would not take place...

...The reason I am not content with merely discussing the book, but wish to explore Bryson's psyche as well, is that language has of late become more acutely than ever, but also more deviously, a battleground...

...collect essays on different aspects of it...

...tells us that the poet "must have possessed thousands of words he never used "because he didn't like or require them," and cites among these "Bible, Trinity, Holy Ghost...

...Relations, the subject here, cannot become indistinguishable...

...Indeed, all the duplicates cited by Bryson are ignorant attempts to make a little-known word more accessible by a (redundant) prefix, e.g., reiterate for the synonymous iterate...

...As for Love's Labour's Won, it may indeed be lost, but it is just as likely to be an earlier title of All's Well That Ends Well...