Bill Bryson provides an entertaining book of history and anecdotes in telling the story (in a round-about way) of how the English language came to be what it is today. There are some interesting tidbits regarding philology (the history of words) and linguistics (how speaking patterns cause languages to evolve). There is the usual (for this topic) parade of English language conundrums, such as how "flammable" and "inflammable" mean the same thing. It really is a wonder that non-native speakers can pick it up as well as they can. Speaking of, he also covers the large amount of foreign words incorporated from other languages. I found it interesting that some of the French and Italian phrases we commonly use either are no long in use in their original language or mean something completely different. I guess my language skills aren't quite as cosmopolitan as I thought they were.
The history of the language was particularly interesting, coming as it did from ancient Germanic Jutes and Saxons as they colonized England during the vacuum created during the withdrawal of the Roman Empire. We might be all be speaking French these days if snooty French aristocrats hadn't insulted the English for their crude accents. The spread of the language worldwide as the most important commercial language is fascinating -- among the things I didn't know that only a handful of the world's 170 or so major airlines use English as their primary language.
Bryson also commits a good portion to the study of dialects; efforts to enumerate them, what defines them, and what impact they have overall on the evolution of language. Here he doesn't focus on English alone, but includes the neighboring Gaelic languages spoken in Scotland and Ireland as a demonstration on how divergent dialects can become. He also shows a word can evolve a completely off-the-wall meaning through a series of mutations -- using cockney English as an example, he takes several phrases or words that start with a known meaning, then changing them to something synonymous, then having the synonym slurred or truncated, then the result being a homonym that leads to another synonymous word and by then you have a word that gains the meaning of a completely unrelated word or phrase.
Bryson ends the book with a study of the origins of various types of word play, from anagrams to rebuses to crosswords.
Many of the anecdotes in this book I've heard before, but it doesn't lessen the entertainment value. It's an easy read, nothing dense along the lines of Steven Pinker. The next time you hear someone utter the phrase, "the exception proves the rule," ask them to explain what that means. Buy them a drink if they know that an archaic definition of "proves" is "tests," and using the latter rule, you discover that the "rule" is being invalidated, often not what is meant when that phrase is uttered.
