Language is more fashion than science

Language is more fashion than science

📖 Bill Bryson

🌍 American | 👨‍💼 Writer

🎂 December 8, 1951

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In "The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way," author Bill Bryson explores the evolution of the English language, highlighting how it adapts and transforms over time. He suggests that language is influenced more by cultural trends and societal changes than by strict scientific principles. Bryson's analysis provides insights into the complexities of English and its development through history, including its borrowing from other languages and its regional variations.

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February 18, 2025

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All Indo - European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, eschewing the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this facility. — Bill Bryson The Mother...

From this I think we can conclude that the definitive English holorime has yet to be written. However, an old children's riddle does seem to come close. It is the one that poses the question "How do...

Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action. Doesn't that seem a useful term? Or how about...

If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia… And there's a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought:...

Not only were the Anglo-Saxons relatively uncultured, they were also pagan, a fact rather quaintly preserved in the names of four of our weekdays, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, which...

Almost all languages change. A rare exception is written Icelandic, which has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years ago, and if Leif Ericson appeared on the...

Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities... much more so than music or language. — Conrad Hall

Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and sometimes be at odds with them. — Leonard Mlodinow

Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm {opposition}, there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict {the choice of one term against another}, and all conflict is generative of meaning: to choose one and refuse the other is always a sacrifice made to meaning, to produce meaning, to offer it to be consumed. — Roland Barthes The Neutral:...

I never knew what language they'd lapse into when fucked – Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both {only the techies came in English}. — Manil Suri The City of Devi

If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet. — Billy Collins

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other. — Emil M. Cioran

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The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...

What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...

If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order...

We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.

Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been...

Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good...

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Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...

Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great....

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📖 Bill Bryson

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