The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

“People don’t always realise,” wrote Kenneth Clark [in Civilisation, page 18], “that only three or four antique manuscripts of the Latin authors are still in existence: our whole knowledge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne.”

Colonel is perhaps the classic example of this orthographic waywardness. The word comes from the old French coronelle, which the French adapted from the Italian colonello (from which we get colonnade). When the word first came into English in the mid-sixteenth century, it was spelled with an r, but gradually the Italian spelling and pronunciation began to challenge it. For a century or more both spellings and pronunciations were commonly used, until finally with inimitable illogic we settled on the French pronunciation and Italian spelling.

In English, in short, we possess a language in which the parts of speech are almost entirely notional. A noun is a noun and a verb is a verb largely because the grammarians say they are. In the sentence “I am suffering terribly” suffering is a verb, but in “My suffering is terrible,” it is a noun. Yet both sentences use precisely the same word to express precisely the same idea. Quickly and sleepily are adverbs but sickly and deadly are adjectives. Breaking is a present tense participle, but as often as not it is used in a past tense sense (“He was breaking the window when I saw him”). Broken, on the other hand, is a past tense participle but as often as not it is employed in a present tense sense (“I think I’ve just broken my toe”) or even future tense sense (“If he wins the next race, he’ll have broken the school record”). To deal with all the anomalies, the parts of speech must be so broadly defined as to be almost meaningless.

Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian’s work is never done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and whispered: “I am about to—or I am going to—die; either expression is used.”

But an even more prolific contributor was an American expatriate named Dr. W. C. Minor, a man of immense erudition who provided from his private library the etymologies of tens of thousands of words. When Murray invited him to a gathering of the dictionary’s contributors, he learned, to his considerable surprise, that Dr. Minor could not attend for the unfortunate reason that he was an inmate at Broadmoor, a hospital for the criminally insane, and not sufficiently in possession of his faculties to be allowed out. It appears that during the U.S. Civil War, having suffered an attack of sunstroke, Dr. Minor developed a persecution mania, believing he was being pursued by Irishmen.

In one year alone, he made 12,000 contributions to the OED from the private library he built up at Broadmoor.