The Mother Tongue

A very Bryson-esque encyclopedic adventure through the history and marvels of the English language. There's quite a bit of interesting bits of etymology and slang that is really quite funny sometimes. My favorite colorful metaphor was the Austrailian "technicolor yawn". And my favorite device was "rhyming slang"; a demonstration: Plaster-of-Paris == Aris(totle), Aristotle == bottle, bottle and glass == ass and hence 'plaster' and 'ass' can be used interchangebly. He also points out how some "rules" of English, aren't really rulese at all. And that means we can start a sentence with a conjuction and that a preposition can be something to end a sentence with.

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