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.

___
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).

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].

[brief pause] “Um, yeah.”

“Well the other day I found… a cat!”

“Oh really, in your house?”

“Well, it’s not so much a house as an apartment. But there was a cat.”

a list of changes I wasn’t looking for, but have now made actual by witnessing them, r.i.p.:

• Rite Aid — closed, empty
• Hollywood Video — closed, empty
• Circuit City — all remnants of the red now gone
• Mann Festival on Lindbrook closed — “thanks for your patronage”
• National Theatre on Lindbrook closed and demolished (you can still see in on Google Maps street view for living in the past)
• Native Foods — you no longer order at the counter? it’s still as tiny as in memory though
• gift store on west side of Westwood Blvd. where i once bought a prism — closed, empty, along with nearly everything else on the block. There was once a Hawaiian BBQ place.

This is just recent changes. This is just in an accidental few-block tour of the mini-city.

There have been other slower and faster deaths through the years. There are other disappearances I didn’t bother to seek out.

“The years… when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.” — C.G. Jung reflecting on Liber Novus (The Red Book)

“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 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.

“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