This month’s book review is a little bit out of the usual. I’m assuming if you love reading then you also love ‘words’, and how they have come to make up the English language.
Well, I have discovered the perfect book to let you know almost everything you need to know about ‘words’; where they come from, how they are to be spelt and pronounced correctly as well as chapters about their history and their future. There’s even a very amusing chapter on swearing (as if you need any help there). Before you worry that I am offering you an academic text, this book, called “Mother Tongue”, is written by one of me favourite travel writers, Bill Bryson, who has given us humorous and informative books like Notes from a Small Island, Neither Here Nor There, and A Walk in the Woods. Is there any subject this writer cannot make interesting? His insights in Down Under, written about his travels around Australia, is a hoot.
Clearly Bryson is a meticulous researcher who knows how to turn a potentially dull subject into an entertaining romp through the twists and turns of how we should and shouldn’t use words, as he explains how “a second-rate mongrel tongue came to be the undisputed language of the globe”.
As an added incentive to read it, the book is now published as a Penguin Popular classic, priced at around $15 at any good bookstore. (Do such places still exist?)
Title: Mother Tongue
Author: By Bill Bryson
Published: Penguin Classic, April 9, 2010 (First published January 1, 1990)
