The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

To a British crossword enthusiast, the clue “An important city in Czechoslovakia” instantly suggests Oslo. Why? Look at Czech(OSLO)vakia again. “A seed you put in the garage” is caraway, while “HIJKLMNO” is water because it is H-to-O or H2O.

Palindromes, sentences that read the same backwards as forwards, are at least 2,000 years old.

Even Christ reputedly made a pun when He said: “Thou art Peter: upon this rock I shall build my Church.”

Even Christ reputedly made a pun when He said: “Thou art Peter: upon this rock I shall build my Church.” It doesn’t make a lot of sense from the wordplay point of view until you realize that in ancient Greek the word for Peter and for rock was the same.

Shakespeare so loved puns that he put 3,000 of them—that’s right, 3,000—into his plays, even to the extent of inserting them in the most seemingly inappropriate places, as when in King Henry IV, Part I, the father of Hotspur learns of his son’s tragic death and remarks that Hotspur is now Coldspur.

Possibly the most demanding form of wordplay in English—or indeed in any language—is the palindrome.

Probably the most famous palindrome is one of the best. It manages in just seven words to tell an entirely sensible story: “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!”

Not far removed from the palindrome is the anagram, in which the letters of a word or name are jumbled to make a new, and ideally telling, phrase.

Another form of wordplay is the rebus, a kind of verbal riddle in which words and symbols are arranged in a way that gives a clue to the intended meaning.

Another form of wordplay is the rebus, a kind of verbal riddle in which words and symbols are arranged in a way that gives a clue to the intended meaning. Can you, for example, guess the meaning of this address? Wood John Mass It is “John Underwood, Andover, Massachusetts.” Many books and articles on word games say that such an address was once put on an envelope and that the letter actually got there, which suggests either that the postal service was once a lot better or writers more gullible than they are now.

The French, in accordance with their high regard for the cerebral, have long cultivated a love of wordplay.

The French, in accordance with their high regard for the cerebral, have long cultivated a love of wordplay. In the Middle Ages, they even had a post of Anagrammatist to the King. One of the great French wordplayers was the novelist Georges Perec, who before his early death in 1982 was a guiding force in the group called OuLiPo (for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), whose members delighted in setting themselves complex verbal challenges. Perec once wrote a novel without once using the letter e (such compositions are called lipograms) and also composed a 5,000-letter palindrome on the subject of, you guessed it, palindromes. An example of a French rebus is “Ga = I am very hungry.” To understand it you must know that in French capital G (“G grand”) and small a (“a petit”) are pronounced the same as “J’ai grand appétit.” N’est-ce-pas? But the French go in for many other games, including some we don’t have. One of the more clever French word games is the holorime, a two-line poem in which each line is pronounced the same but uses different words. As you will quickly see from the following example, sense often takes a backseat to euphony in these contrivances: “Par le bois du Djinn, ou s’entasse de l’éffroi, “Parle! Bois du gin, ou cent tasses de lait froid!” It translates roughly as “When going through the Djinn’s woods, surrounded by so much fear, keep talking. Drink gin or a hundred cups of cold milk.”

We have the capacity to do this in English—​“I love you” and “isle of view” are holorimic phrases and there must be an infinity of others.

“In Ayrshire hill areas, a cruise, eh, lass? “Inertia, hilarious, accrues, hélas.”

A rare attempt to compose an English holorime was made by the British humorist Miles Kington (from whom the previous example is quoted) in 1988 when he offered the world this poem, called A Lowlands Holiday Ends in Enjoyable Inactivity: “In Ayrshire hill areas, a cruise, eh, lass? “Inertia, hilarious, accrues, hélas.”

From this I think we can conclude that the definitive English holorime has yet to be written.

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 you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog? The answer: (1) a sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane; (2) an inclined plane is a slope up; (3) a slow pup is a lazy dog.

Sir Humphry Davy Detested gravy. He lived in the odium Of having invented sodium.

We may not have holorimes in English, but we do have tricks that the French don’t have. Clerihews, for instance. Named after their deviser, one E. Clerihew Bentley, an English journalist, they are pithy poems that always start with someone’s name and purport, in just four lines, to convey the salient facts of the subject’s life. To wit: Sir Humphry Davy Detested gravy. He lived in the odium Of having invented sodium.

As Jespersen notes: “No literature in the world abounds as English does in characters made ridiculous to the reader by the manner in which they misapply or distort ‘big’ words,”* and he cites, among others, Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop, Fielding’s Mrs. Slipslop, Dickens’s Sam Weller, and Shakespeare’s Mrs. Quickly.

The East End of London has always been a melting pot, and they’ve taken terms from every wave of invaders, from French Huguenot weavers in the sixteenth century to Bangladeshis of today.

The East End of London has always been a melting pot, and they’ve taken terms from every wave of invaders, from French Huguenot weavers in the sixteenth century to Bangladeshis of today. Many others have come from their own eye-opening experiences overseas during the period of empire and two world wars. Shufti, for “have a look at,” and buckshee, for “something that is free,” both come from India. “Let’s have a parlyvoo” (meaning “a chat”) comes obviously from the French parlez-vous. Less obvious is the East End expression san fairy ann, meaning “don’t mention it, no problem,” which is a corruption of the French “ça ne fait rien.” The cockneys have also devised hundreds of terms of their own. “Hang about” means “wait a minute.” “Leave it out” means “stop, don’t keep on at me.” “Straight up” means “honestly, that’s the truth.” Someone who is misbehaving is “out of order” or “taking liberties.”

According to the Census Bureau, 11 percent of people in America speak a language other than English at home.

But perhaps the most important question facing English as it lumbers toward the twenty-first century is whether it will remain one generally cohesive tongue or whether it will dissolve into a collection of related but mutually incomprehensible sublanguages.

But perhaps the most important question facing English as it lumbers toward the twenty-first century is whether it will remain one generally cohesive tongue or whether it will dissolve into a collection of related but mutually incomprehensible sublanguages. In 1978, in a speech to 800 librarians in Chicago, Robert Burchfield, then the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries, noted his belief that British English and American English were moving apart so inexorably that within 200 years they could be mutually unintelligible. Or as he rather inelegantly put it: “The two forms of English are in a state of dissimilarity which should lead to a condition of unintelligibility, given another two hundred years.” (And this from the man chosen to revise Fowler’s Modern English Usage!) The assertion provoked a storm of articles on both sides of the Atlantic, almost all of them suggesting that Burchfield was, in this instance, out of his mind. People, it must be said, have been expecting English to fracture for some time. Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster, as we have seen, both expected American English to evolve into a discrete language. So did H. L. Mencken in the first edition of The American Language, though by the 1936 edition he had reversed this opinion, and was suggesting, perhaps only half in jest, that British English was becoming an American dialect. The belief was certainly not uncommon up until the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1880s, Henry Sweet, one of the most eminent linguistic authorities of his day, could confidently predict: “In another century . . . ​England, America and Australia will be speaking mutually unintelligible languages.” But of course nothing of the sort happened—and, I would submit, is not likely to now. Following the controversy aroused by his speech, Burchfield wrote an article in the London Observer defending his lonesome position. After expressing some surprise at the response to his remarks, which he said had been made “almost in passing,” he explained that he felt that “the two main forms of English separated geographically from the beginning and severed politically since 1776, are continuing to move apart and that existing elements of linguistic diversity between them will intensify as time goes on.” This is not quite the same thing as saying they are becoming separate languages, but it is still a fairly contentious assertion. The main planks of Burchfield’s defense rest on two principal beliefs. The first is that the divergence of languages is a reasonable historical presumption. In the past, most languages have split at some point, as when the mutually intelligible North Germanic dialects evolved into the mutually unintelligible languages of German, Dutch, and English. And, second, Burchfield observed that English already has many words that cause confusion. “It is easy to assemble lists of American expressions that are not (or are barely) intelligible to people in this country,” he wrote in The Observer, and cited as examples: barf, boffo, badmouth, schlepp, and schlock. That may be true (though, in point of fact, most Britons could gather the meaning of these words from their context) but even so the existence of some confusing terms hardly establishes permanent linguistic divergence. An Iowan traveling through Pennsylvania would very probably be puzzled by many of the items he found on menus throughout the state—soda, scrapple, subs, snits, fat cakes, funnel cakes, and several others all would be known either by other names or not at all to the Iowan. Yet no one would suggest that Iowa and Pennsylvania are evolving separate languages. The same is surely no less true for American and British English.

The suggestion that English will evolve into separate branches in the way that Latin evolved into French, Spanish, and Italian seems to me to ignore the very obvious consideration that communications have advanced a trifle in the intervening period.

The suggestion that English will evolve into separate branches in the way that Latin evolved into French, Spanish, and Italian seems to me to ignore the very obvious consideration that communications have advanced a trifle in the intervening period. Movies, television, books, magazines, record albums, business contacts, tourism—all these are powerfully binding influences. At the time of writing, a television viewer in Britain could in a single evening watch Neighbours, an Australian soap opera, Cheers, an American comedy set in Boston, and EastEnders, a British program set among cockneys in London. All of these bring into people’s homes in one evening a variety of vocabulary, accents, and other linguistic influences that they would have been unlikely to experience in a single lifetime just two generations ago.

If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should be not that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.