Rick B. (bup) - , reviewed on 9/8/2012 + 166 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

A couple of friends of mine recommended Bill Bryson as an author, and this is the first book I got my hands on. While breezy and interesting, I guess I hoped for something more cohesive. Essentially, each chapter is a self-contained essay, some of which are at best tangentially related to how English got the way it is (a chapter on wordplay, for instance, told me nothing I didn't know and seemed like an excuse for Bryson to list some beloved palindromes).

I found chapters that explained how much of our language came from Latin, Norman, German, Gaelic and native tribes of the Americas more interesting, and what fossils of ancient grammar or words we can still find lying in the exposed dirt, as it were (child->children, man->men and woman->women are some of the mere handfuls of words left in our language where pluralization comes in the typical German way. Court martial and attorney general come from the Normans, who learned to place adjectives after nouns, like the French).

Anyhow, worth a quick read, which it is.

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