My goodreads review:
Bill Bryson, as always, covers his topic in an educational, but not dryly academic, manner. The book is easy and really enjoyable to read and full of so many facts and anecdotes that I don’t remember even half of them. He references his sources, so the reader can delve deeper into the topic if so desired, and, (I appreciate this) calls out when the tidbits and *facts* he’s sharing are a bit apocryphal.

Topics: the beginnings of language, the beginnings of English, pronunciation (old and new), spelling (old and new), accents and dialects, creoles and pidgins, English around the world, the present and future of English, &c.

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Words I learned:
concomitant — accompanying especially in a subordinate or incidental way (Note: This is just one of those words that he uses a few times and I’ve heard several other places lately, so I hope to learn and remember it’s meaning.)
velleity — that “which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action” (Note: This word is not so much in common use.)
polysemy — the capacity for a word (or other signifier) to have multiple meanings (eg., boil = as in heat or skin ailment, policy = plan or in insurance policy, excise = to cut or customs duty)
contranym — a word that means the opposite of itself (eg., sanction = to permit or a measure fordidding, cleave = to separate or to cling to, sanguine = hotheaded or calm and secure, bolt = take off running or hold down, quinquennial = lasting 5 years or happening once every 5 years)
orthological — the art of correct grammar and correct use of words

and many more facts and words and concepts than I can begin to remember

doppleganger
mantra
kismet
aeon (as opposed but related to eon)
mutation
symbiotic
chimera
gamma radiation
phoenix

I imagine that many people’s objections to Rep. Barton’s claim would be that the real tragedy is the deaths and devastation caused by the BP oil spill. But politics aside, my ears perked up at this, not because I object so wholeheartedly to the claim but because I don’t even understand the claim. “Tragedy of the first order,” “tragedy of the first degree,” these I have heard and can make sense of, but “first proportion”? — misstatement, coining a phrase, or just new to me?

Remember kids, the possibilities of language run the gambit [sic].

“Yet the most classical narrative (a novel by Zola or Balzac or Dickens or Tolstoy) bears within it a sort of diluted tmesis: we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, casual, unconcerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages (anticipated as ‘boring’) in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote (which are always its articulations: whatever furthers the solution of the riddle, the revelation of fate): we boldly skip (no one is watching) description, explanations, analyses, conversations…. [Tmesis] does not occur at the level of the structure of languages but only at the moment of their consumption; the author cannot predict tmesis; he cannot choose to write what will not be read. And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives: has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Proust’s good fortune: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same pasages.)” p. 10-11

*3 “Will We Decamp for the Northern Rim?” by Laurence C. Smith
–how global warming will affect where we settle with consideration to infrastructure already in place in Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia

*17 “Mirror Neurons: Are We Ethical by Nature?” by Christian Keysers
–how one person’s premotor cortex, for ex., will mirror that of someone they’re watching perform a task and how that might be an argument for “intuitive altruism”

*26 “How to Enhance Human Beings” by Nick Bostrom
–a look at possible enhancements with a look to why evolution may not have already enhanced us in these ways (”changed trade-offs,” “value discordance,” and/or “evolutionary restrictions”)

41 “Our Place in an Unnatural Universe” by Sean Carroll
–entropy, physics

53 “Just What Is Dark Energy?” by Stephon H. S. Alexander
–dark matter/cosmological constant

70 “Development of the Social Brain in Adolescence” by Sarah-Jayne Blackmore
–social brain / mentalizing, brain doesn’t stop changing in early childhood

*78 “Watching Minds Interact” by Jason P. Mitchell
–social brain

90 “What Makes Big Ideas Sticky” by Matthew D. Lieberman
–Descartes vs. Becher, Eastern vs. Western culture, are our brains predisposed to believe or need to believe certain things?

*105 “Fruit Flies of the Moral Mind” by Joshua D. Greene
–moral dilemmas, are our “moral” decisions based on evolutionary instincts? and how do these interact in a newly technological world that evolution hasn’t yet caught up with?

*117 “How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?” by Lera Boroditsky
–how the structure of language might impact culture, the Kuuk Thaayorre in Australia always use cardinal directions to indicate direction (instead of “left” “right” “behind”) (doesn’t seem to adequately explain that it’s language that causes the difference in thought and not thought that causes the difference in language or some other cause)

*131 “Memory Enhancement, Memory Erasure: The Future of Our Past” by Sam Cooke
–nootropics, erasing memories, creating memories

145 “The Vital Importance of Imagination” by Deena Skolnick Weisberg
–differences in imagination between children and adults, imagination as a tool for learning

*156 “Brain Time” by David M. Eagleman
–how our brain handles the fact that sensory input happening at the same time takes different amounts of time to reach our brain

171 “Out of Our Minds: How Did Homo sapiens Come Down from the Trees, and Why Did No One Follow?” by Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare
–dogs, silver foxes, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans: communication and cooperation

186 “The Aliens Among Us” by Nathan Wolfe
–viruses: the good and the bad

*198 “How Did the Social Insects Become Social?” by Seirian Sumner
–socially polymorphic bees and wasps that can choose to be social or not: are these the evolutionary link between non-social and wholly social? what are the evolutionary benefits of having only one queen?

212 “Extinction and the Evolution of Humankind” by Katerina Havarti
–the extinction of other branches of humankind

225 “Why Hasn’t Specialization Led to the Balkanization of Science?” by Gavin Schmidt
–is interdisciplinary study better than specialization?

*my favorites, but they’re all very interesting

I like the poetry of it, the sound of it (the repetition). It’s also a nice callback to Genesis. “In the beginning” then God spoke “Let there be light.” So, quite literally, mythologically speaking, in the beginning was the Word of God. Also, there’s a part later in John chapter 1 about the “Word became flesh,” and sure he means Jesus, but it just sounds really interesting and mysterious– words becoming incarnate.

But I digress. (I began with digression in fact.) The book I’m reading provides this translation “In the beginning was the ratio, and the ratio was with God, and the ratio was God.” Apparently ratio is another translation of the Greek “logos,” more commonly “word.” I guess this makes sense word-root-edly speaking if you consider words like “analogy” and “logic” and, on the other side, the Latin-by-way-of-French “ratiocination.” All three words imply reasoning via comparisons, i.e. ratios.

I digress again. My though upon reading that version went this direction: What would it mean to the passage if we translate it a different way? And how did John mean it? And what other translations could there be? Well, it turns out a lot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos. I quite enjoy discovering heavy words.

“Where strictness of grammar does not weaken expression, it should be attended to in complaisance to the purists of New England. But where by small grammatical negligences, the energy of an idea is condensed, or a word stands for a sentence, I hold grammatical rigor in contempt.”

Today I was thinking about how I like the word “teleological”—directed towards an end result. (Teleology is then the study of purpose or design.) That thought passed as I remembered I wanted to look up baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to figure out chemically why it’s just so ubiquitously useful. I got distracted from that goal when I discovered that baking soda is actually an ingredient in some baking powder, which reminded me that in kindergarten our teacher used to add water to cornstarch and let us play with it. (This is more fun than it sounds because this mixture creates a non-Newtonian fluid. Try it.) Anyway, from there I learned that there is a medical condition where you compulsively eat  cornstarch (amylophagia), which  “can be an often-overlooked etiologic factor in gestational diabetes.”

Etiology, it turns out, is basically the opposite of teleology—it’s the study of causation or origin. Of course teleology would have a partner; I’d just never thought to look before.

Lessons: I may have ADD. I may be a nerd. Cornstarch is one of the more-fun food-related things.

Yalta is in the Ukraine. Google Maps can’t give me directions between Moscow and Yalta, which implies that either the two are, indeed, difficult to travel between or that Google Maps knows as much about (post-Soviet) geography as I do.

By the way, Glocca Morra is supposedly fictitious (it’d be in Ireland if it existed), but in searching for information about it I discovered that there is a genre of “adult entertainment” called Lepreporn. I won’t go into details; what you’re imagining is probably much more interesting.

Other great place names (toponyms):
Massapequa
Adirondacks
Poughkeepsie
Patagonia
Delaware
Abyssinia
Bethesda