Loving the Mother Tongue

My first encounter with Bill Bryson was close to ten years ago when I read his hilarious memoir A Walk in the Woods, about his hike along the Appalachian Trail. I'm pretty sure I loaned it to someone a while ago and never got it back. Which is too bad, because since finishing The Mother Tongue, I just want to read Woods again. Luckily, I do still have my copy of I'm A Stranger Here Myself, Bryson's equally hilarious memoir of his family's move back to the United States after twenty years in Britain. That book will make you equally proud of and resigned to the fact that you live in America. And did I mention it's hilarious?

The Mother Tongue is many things, but hilarious is not one of them. Bryson's voice is there, knowing, wise, a bit snarky, but not as sharp as it is in the other two I've read, which were written later. In some ways it's like he doesn't completely trust his sense of humor yet. On the other hand, this book is by its very nature far less personal and anecdotal than the others. It's a more scholarly work, so it doesn't lend itself to the sort of storytelling that Bryson does elsewhere. This is not a disappointment in and of itself, but since I was expecting something a bit different, I couldn't help but be a little disappointed.

Here's what the book is: a deep dive into the origins, development, and current state of the English language, with primers on grammar, globalization, etymology, spelling, and even swearing. While the content itself is scholarly, Bryson doesn't miss an opportunity to add an amusing bit of trivia, such as the last words of French grammarian Dominique Bonhours: "I am about to--or I am going to--die; either expression is used." In a more serious book, such stories wouldn't have a place, but Bryson knows how to convey serious and substantial information while allowing for moments of levity. It's what made this book readable; as much as the English language interests me, I don't want to spend my pleasure-reading time with a textbook. I appreciate the fact that Bryson taught me so much without making me feel like I was reading one.

It is a dense book, though, and I breathed a small sigh of relief upon completing it. It felt like an accomplishment. And in the end, despite moments of affection for the quirks and foibles of English, this book is not the work of someone who truly loves the language. I say that because the things that delight me about it are the very things that irk Bryson. He has clearly never spent the better part of an hour playing around with parts of speech in the company of fourteen-year-olds, or he wouldn't have said anything like this: "In English, in short, we possess a language in which the parts of speech are almost entirely notional. A noun is a noun and a verb is a verb largely because the grammarians say they are. In the sentence 'I am suffering terribly' suffering is a verb, but in 'My suffering is terrible,' it is a noun. Yet both sentences use precisely the same word to express precisely the same idea." I take exception with this on a number of levels. In the second sentence, "suffering" functions as a verbal phrase, in which a verb acts as a noun, a fairly simple grammatical concept that occurs quite frequently. I teach my students this, and we play around with using "ing" verbs in all their various forms: verbs, nouns, adjectives. That's part of the fun. I also disagree that those two sentences say the same thing. They do not. Making yourself the subject of a sentence is very different from making your suffering the subject. A writer as skilled as Bryson, who employs modifiers as well as any non-fiction writer I know, should understand that.

In any case, I feel a little bit smarter than I did before I read this book, and there is always plenty to gain from reading a writer like Bryson. I'm a believer in taking in well-written words on every possible occasion. It's good for my own thinking and writing, and I really think it just makes me a better person. There's no research to back that up, but I believe it in my gut. So read Bill Bryson, anything he's written, and improve yourself.