This is very different from Bryson’s travel writing; however, he pulls it off. Following his earlier book ‘Made in America’ he devotes a few chapters to American English, but more about the language rather than culture influences as seen in his other works.
He covers many topics from ‘the dawn of language’ to ‘the
future of English’ showing the accepted academic opinion without being afraid of
sharing his own. For example, his unique theory how Homo sapiens was able to succeed
Neanderthal Man through more sophisticated language.
He [homo sapiens] possessed a linguistic system sufficiently
sophisticated to deal with concepts such as: ‘Today let’s kill some red deer.
You take some big sticks and drive the deer out of the woods and we’ll stand by
the riverbank with our spears and kill them as they come towards us’. By
comparison Neanderthal speech may have been something more like: ‘I’m hungry
let’s hunt.’
Nearing the end of
the book he explores many light-hearted topics including ‘swearing’ and ‘wordplay’.
You will learn many surprising facts as he addresses a mass of topics and is
able to string them together effortlessly.
Despite its’ popularity, I must criticise this book for the
amount of factual errors it contains. Since it was published in 1990, it does
not show modern research and therefore many ideas are outdated. But Bryson did
not sell this as a reference book, instead a lively introduction to language. He
uses humour to set this book a part from more academic works, making this accessible
to anyone with no prior knowledge on language.
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