Interesting comments on language

I just finished Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue. While I found this book much drier than his comedic I’m a Stranger Here Myself, there were some notable quotes, particularly because I am so fixated on language, as of late. Here are a few, or rather, several . . . . okay, a bunch of the passages I most enjoyed.

English speakers dread silence. We are all familiar with the uncomfortable feeling that overcomes us when a conversation palls. Studies have shown 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. (36)

If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia. When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden that sensation of falling, there is a word for it: it’s a myoclonic jerk. Vellacitydescribes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action. There is even a word for a figure of speech in which two connotative words linked by a conjunction express a complex notion that would normally be conveyed by an adjective and a substantive working together. It is a hendiadys. In English, in short, there are words for almost everything. (67, albeit a bit out of order)

This is of course one of the glories of English—its willingness to take in words from abroad, rather as if they were refugees. We take words from almost anywhere—shampoo from India, chaparral from the Basques, caucus from the Algonquin Indians, ketchup from China, potato from Haiti, sofa from Arabia, boondocks from the Tagalog language of the Philipines, slogan from Gaelic. You can’t get much more eclectic than that. (73)

Garbage, which has had its present meaning of food waste since the Middle Ages, was brought to England by the Normans, who had adapted it from the Italian dialectal word garbuglio (a mess), which ultimately had come from the Latin bullire (to boil or bubble). (73)

We pronounce many words—perhaps most—in ways that are considerably at variance with the ways they are spelled and often even more so with the ways we think we are saying them. We may believe we say “later” but in fact we say “lader.” We may think we say “ladies,” but it’s more probably “laties” or even, in the middle of a busy sentence, “lays.” Handbag comes out as “hambag.” We think we say “butter,” but it’s really “budder” or “buddah” or even “bu’r”…. We think we say “granted,” but really say “grannid.” No one says “looked.” It’s “lookt.” “I’ll just get her” becomes “aldges gedder.” We constantly allow sounds to creep into words where they have no real business. We introduce a “p” between “m” and “t” or “m” and “s” sounds, so that we really say “warmpth” and “something.” We can’t help ourselves. (87)

[Chinese] radicals can stand alone or be combined to form other words…. Mouth and bird make song. Two women mans quarrel and three women means gossip. (117)

When you look into the background of these [grammatical] “rules” there is often little basis for them. Consider the curiously persistent notion that sentences should not end with a preposition. The source of this stricture, and several other equally dubious ones, was one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life both in his native England and abroad. It is to Lowth we can trace many a pedant’s most treasured notions: the belief that you must say different from rather than different to or different than, the idea that two negatives make a positive…. Perhaps the most remarkable and curiously enduring of Lowth’s m any beliefs was the conviction that sentences ought not to end with a preposition. But even he was not didactic about it…. He suggested only that he thought it generally better and more graceful, not crucial, to place the preposition before its relative “in solemn and elevated” writing. Within a hundred years this had been converted from a piece of questionable advice into an immutable rule. In a remarkable outburst of literal-mindedness, nineteenth-century academics took it as read that the very name pre-position meant it must come before something—anything. (141)

“I’m hurrying, are I not?” is hopelessly ungrammatical, but “I’m hurrying, aren’t I”—merely a contraction of the same words—is perfect English. Many is almost always a plural (as in “Many people were there”), but not when it is followed by a, as in “Many a man was there.” There’s no inherent reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar. They are because they are. (143)

It can take years for an American to master the intricacies of British idiom, and vice versa. In Britain homely is a flattering expression (equivalent to homey); in America it means “ugly.” In Britain upstairs is the first floor; in America it is the second…. Presently means “now” in America; in Britain it means “in a little while.” Sometimes these can cause considerable embarrassment, most famously with the British expression “I’ll knock you up in the morning,” which means “I’ll knock on your door in the morning.” (176-177)

Among the Chinese, to be called a turtle is the worst possible taunt…. Among the Xoxa tribe of South Africa the most provocative possible remark is hlebeshako--“your mother’s ears.” In French it is a grave insult to call someone a cow or a camel and the effect is considerably intensified if you precede it with espece de (“kind of”) so that it is worse in French to be called kind of a cow than to be called just a cow. (214)

Some cultures don’t swear at all. The Japanese, Malayans, and most Polynesians and American Indians do not have native swear words. The Finns, lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feelings when you stub your toe getting up to answer a wrong number at 2:00 A.M., rather oddly adopted the word ravintolassa. It means “in the restaurant.” (214)

Cool Anagrams: circumstantial evidence = can ruin a selected victim; a stitch in time saves nine = this is meant as incentive; funeral = real fun; The Morse Code = Here come dots; intoxicate = excitation; mother-in-law = woman Hitler. (230, minus a few)

A holorime is French word game comprised of a two-line poem in which each line is pronounced the same but uses different words. A short exemplary pair of English phrases would be “I love you” and “isle of view.” An old children’s riddle comes as close to an English holorime as any attempt that has been made. It is the one that poses the question “How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?” The answer: (1) a sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane; (2) an inclined plane is a slop up; (3) a slow pup is a lazy dog. (taken from 231-232)