The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

Consider for a moment President George H. W. Bush explaining why he would not support a ban on semiautomatic weapons: “But I also want to have—be the President that protects the rights of, of people to, to have arms. And that—so you don’t go so far that the legitimate rights on some legislation are, are, you know, impinged on.” As Tom Wicker noted in an article in The New York Times [February 24, 1988] critically anatomizing the president’s speaking abilities, “could he not express himself at least in, like, maybe, you know, sixth- or seventh-grade English, rather than speaking as if he were Dan Quayle trying to explain the Holocaust?” But compared with the vice president, Mr. Bush is an extemporaneous speaker of the first mark. Here is Vice President Quayle speaking off the cuff at a Thanksgiving festival in Charles City, Virginia: “I suppose three important things certainly come to my mind that we want to say thank you. The first would be our family. Your family, my family—which is composed of an immediate family of a wife and three children, a larger family with grandparents and aunts and uncles. We all have our family, whichever that may be” [quoted in the Des Moines Register, November 23, 1988]. And they said oratory was dead.