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

There is really no few quotes or list of facts to sum up this book. It’s all over the place, delightfully and frustratingly.

Here’s a link.

I’ll share one quote, though there are better others.

“[he] fell away into the bottomless abyss of the formerly known.” — “110 West Sixty-first Street”

I particularly liked “Chablis,” “Bluebeard,” “The Palace at Four A.M.,” and “Sentence.”

I particularly did not like “At the Tolstoy Museum,” “The Wound,” and “Conversations with Goethe” (even though the title was so promising).

“Like all stories of creators who bring life from the dead, his story began with a struggling butcher, who chased a gray cat, caught it, took off its studded collar, and slit its throat.” The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia

a lifelong suspension of disbelief amongst knights of faith

also, what makes magic realism different than science fiction.

in philosophy
Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling — Abraham as more than the knight of infinite resignation, as the knight of faith, facing down the absurd, and furthermore willing it

in philosophy / philology
Crispin Sartwell: End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History — references Job and Abraham (à la Kierkegaard) as examples of loss of telos / loss of plot / loss of a “sense of narrative coherence” (18)

in sociology
Stanley Milgram: Obedience to Authority — cites the Abraham story as an example of the age-old “dilemma” of obedience (preface)

in song
Bob Dylan: “Highway 61 Revisited” — “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’ Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’”

in fiction
Neil Simon: God’s Favorite — Job modernized and made comical

in philosophy / anthropology
René Girard: Job the Victim of his People — Job as scapegoat (not yet read)

in psychology
C.G. Jung: Answer to Job and Edward F. Edinger: Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job (not yet read)

other disturbing lessons:
Cain and Abel (in fiction: East of Eden by John Steinbeck)

David and Bathsheba and Uriah (in fiction: God Knows by Joseph Heller)

the prodigal son (As a child I objected to the prodigal son getting a feast while the “good” son gets no reward. As an adult I’m frustrated that my brain is stuck believing “prodigal” means someone who has gone away and now returned. I always have to concentrate to land on the right definition.)

“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

“I said that while it was true that the telling of a life tended to falsify it, gave it a form it did not intrinsically possess, this was just a fact of writing things down, something we all accepted. // I realized as I was saying this that I no longer did.” p. 74

p. 141 ‘kids playing by stream’
“The lesson would have been that no one else will ever view our lives exactly as we do” p. 142

“Alcestis, back from the tunnel and half in love with death” p. 151

Notes:

Ch. 1 Why Aren’t Our Cities Like That?
-leaders as architects: FDR (amateur) and Jefferson vs. Louis XIV
-from the French: avenues = important diagonal streets; boulevards = broad promenades
-”With very few exceptions… we have made street corners, not plazas, into symbolic civic places.” (27) Hollywood/Vine or Times Square vs. Red Square or Piazza San Marco
-John Lukacs on American restlessness: we have street corners b/c we are mobile; we are mobile because we have a vast continent to move on in (34)

Ch 2. The Measure of a Town
-word roots: German (burg), French (bourg, ville), Latin (urbs, rus), Old English (t?n), Old French (cité), Spanish (ciudad), Italian (cittá)
-American city planner Kevin Lynch’s three conceptual models for cities: cosmic, practical, organic
-French historian Fernand Braudel’s three stages in early history of English gowns: open, closed, subjugated

Ch 3. A New, Uncrowded World
-Hispanic vs. French vs. English colonial urbanization
-The Laws of the Indies
-Native American settlements

Ch. 4 A Frenchman in New York
-Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave-Auguste de Beaumont
-de Tocqueville on democracy leaving art at the mercy of the masses (101)
-New York as commercial capital, Boston as cultural capitol, and Washington as seat of govt. “This diffusion of powers was not accidental.” (104)

Ch. 5 In the Land of the Dollar
-the word “downtown” is of American origin

Ch. 6 Civic Art
-the skyscraper—symbol of commercialism in America (144)

Ch. 7 High Hopes
-1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition
-Le Corbusier
-highway construction as Pyrrhic victory—”There was a temporary creation of construction jobs, to be sure, but the highways (usually elevated) wrought physical havoc on the established urban fabric…” (161)
-Cabrini-Green, Chicago

Ch. 8 Country Homes for City People
-city vs. suburb

Ch. 9 The New Downtown
-the rise of malls
-private property/public space
-supermarkets (due to cars)

Ch. 10 The Best of Both Worlds

“Christianity Misunderstood by Men of Science”

good point and faulty analogy?
“Just as the individual man cannot live without having some theory of the meaning of his life, and is always, though often unconsciously, framing his conduct in accordance with the meaning he attributes to his life, so too associations of men living in similar conditions—nations—cannot but have theories of the meaning of their associated life and conduct ensuing from those theories. And as the individual man, when he attains a fresh stage of growth, inevitably changes his philosophy of life, and the grown-up man sees a different meaning in it from the child, so too associations of men—nations—are bound to change their philosophy of life and the conduct ensuing from their philosophy, to correspond with their development.” p. 61

unexpected use of mathematical analogy?
“Christ recognizes the existence of both sides of the parallelogram…”
“The divine perfection is the asymptote of human life to which it is always striving, and always approaching, though it can only be reached in infinity.”

“Conclusion”
“And, indeed, what sort of ethical doctrine could admit the legitimacy of murder for any object whatever? It is as impossible as a theory of mathematics admitting that two is equal to three.// There may be a semblance of mathematics admitting that two is equal to three, but there can be no real science of mathematics. And there can only be a semblance of ethics in which murder in the shape of war and the execution of criminals is allowed, but no true ethics.”

“Evil Cannot Be Suppressed by the Physical Force of the
Government”

social contract theory
“And it cannot be proved, as the champions of the state maintain, that the destruction of government involves a social chaos, mutual spoliation and murder, the destruction of all social institutions, and the return of mankind to barbarism. Nor can it be proved as the opponents of government maintain that men have already become so wise and good that they will not spoil or murder one another, but will prefer peaceful associations to hostilities; that of their own accord, unaided by the state, they will make all the arrangements that they need, and that therefore government, far from being any aid, under show of guarding men exerts a pernicious and brutalizing influence over them.”

(next sentence)
hypocritical condemnation of abstract reasoning? (most of this book is Tolstoy using abstract reasoning to claim things are obvious conclusions)
“It is impossible to prove either of these contentions by abstract reasoning. Still less possible is it to prove them by experiment, since the whole matter turns on the question, ought we to try the experiment?”

“To create a space that never existed is what interests me.” — architect Daniel Libeskind (on TED Talks, shown here)

“I’ve come to the conclusion that men don’t make history, I think history makes personalities.” — novelist Joseph Heller (in this interview [youtube clip]) (This clip also contains some interesting (moreso in hindsight) commentary about John Kennedy’s election over Richard Nixon)

“And one of the first things they did was they tried to take the comics page as is and transplant it to monitors, which is a classic McLuhanesque mistake of appropriating the shape of the previous technology as the content of the new technology.” — cartoonist Scott McCloud (on TED Talks here)

(this is reducing it far too much, but it’s a start:)

“memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.” p. 317

“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.” p. 336