The Adventure of English Quotes

“Shakespeare shoved into bed together words that scarcely knew each other before, had never even been introduced.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“The masculine pronouns are he, his and him But imagine the feminine she, shis and shim! So our English, I think you’ll all agree Is the trickiest language you ever did see.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“That, too, is part of this adventure — there are both casualties and survivors as this hungry creature, English, demanded more and more subjects.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“The Old English names began to die out: out went Ethelbert, Aelfric, Athelstan, Dunstan, Wulfstan, Wulfric; in came Richard, Robert, Simon, Stephen, John, and most popular and sycophantic (or was it politic?) of all, William.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“One aspect of English which has been a recurring feature in its history is the way a word will be adapted from one age to another so that a ‘chip’ can go from wood to silicon, include golf and a slight and feature as fifty per cent of a British diet.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“America became very confident in its own English language. A witty resolution was proposed in the House of Representatives in 1820 suggesting they educate the English in their own language: Whereas the House of Representatives in common with the people of America is justly proud of its admirable native tongue and regards this most expressive and energetic language as one of the best of its birthrights . . . Resolved, therefore, that the nobility and gentry of England be courteously invited to send their elder sons and such others as may be destined to appear as politic speakers in Church and State to America for their education . . . [and after due instruction he suggested that they be given] certificates of their proficiency in the English tongue.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“English was the language of protest and protesting its right to be heard and taken account of before the highest in the land. And the highest of the land used it in 1381, to chop down the revolt of thousands of English speakers.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“A written language brings precision, forces ideas into steady shapes, secures against loss. Once the words are on the page they are there to be challenged and embellished by those who come across them later.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“We shall fight on the beaches,” said Churchill in 1940, “we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Only “surrender” is not Old English. That, in itself, might be significant.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“Old English ‘æppel’ used to mean any kind of fruit.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“English speakers tended the living cattle, for instance, which we still call by the Old English words ‘ox’ or, more usually today, ‘cow’. French speakers ate prepared meat which came to the table, which we call by the French word ‘beef’. In the same way the English ‘sheep’ became the French ‘mutton’, ‘calf’ became ‘veal’, ‘deer’ became ‘venison’, ‘pig’ ‘pork’, English animal, French meat in every case. The English laboured, the French feasted.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“Domesday was a good word for it. Twenty years after the Battle of Hastings, William sent out his officers to take stock of his kingdom. The monks of Peterborough were still recording the events of history in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and they noted, disapprovingly, that not one piece of land escaped the survey, ‘not even an ox or a cow or a pig’. William claimed all.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“Word endings fell away. Prepositions came in which took the language away from the Germanic and made it more English. Instead of adding a lump on the end of words, you could use ‘to’ or ‘with’. ‘I gave the dog to my daughter.’ ‘I cut the meat with my knife.’ The order of words became important and prepositions became more common as signposts around sentences.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“According to Bede, writing at the beginning of the eighth century, Essex, Sussex and Wessex were planted by the Saxons; East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria by the Angles; the Jutes took Kent and the Isle of Wight.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“We can see American English downtown in any city in the States. We would look up a block of “apartments” to a “penthouse,” be deluged by the “mass media,” go into a “chain store,” breakfast on “cornflakes,” avoid the “hot dog,” see the “commuters” walking under strips of “neon,” not “jaywalking,” which would be “moronic,” but if they were “executives” or “go-getters” (not “yes-men” or “fat cats”), they would be after “big business,” though unlikely to have much to do with an “assembly line” or a “closed shop.” There’s likely to be a “traffic jam,” so no “speeding,” certainly no space for “joy-riding” and the more “underpasses” the better. And of course in any downtown city we would be surrounded by a high forest of “skyscrapers.” “Skyscraper” started life as an English naval term — a high light sail to catch the breeze in calm conditions. It was the name of the Derby winner in 1788, after which tall houses became generally called skyscrapers. Later it was a kind of hat, then slang for a very tall person. The word arrived in America as a baseball term, meaning a ball hit high in the air. Now its world meaning is very tall building, as typified by those in American cities. Then you could go into a “hotel” (originally French for a large private house) and find a “lobby” (adopted from English), find the “desk clerk” and the “bell boy,” nod to the “hat-check girl” as you go to the “elevator.” Turn on the television, flick it all about and you’re bound to find some “gangsters” with their “floozies” in their “glad rags.” In your bedroom, where the English would have “bedclothes,” the Americans have “covers”; instead of a “dressing gown” you’ll find a “bathrobe,” “drapes” rather than “curtains,” a “closet” not a “wardrobe,” and in the bathroom a “tub” with a “faucet” and not a “bath” with a “tap.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“live, the words we think in, sing in, speak in; the words which nourish our imagination, words which tell us what we are. Although English only exists in the mouths, minds and pens of its many individual users, I came to feel that English had a character and presence of its own. This is not how professional linguists see it, but just as some historians see “England” with a life of its own at certain times, so the language itself, in my view, can be seen as a living organism. It is not known with any certainty as yet when language evolved: one hundred thousand years ago? Later? It probably began as signs and calls, gestures and facial and bodily expressions, many of which we retain still. We speak of “body language.” We can tell what someone is “saying” by their expression. We “talk” in our expressions still and our extreme calls of fear or ecstasy may not be much different from those of the first Homo sapiens a hundred thousand years ago. But then language began to build. We will never know who laid the foundations. Stephen Pinker and others think that Homo sapiens arrived with the gift of language innate — the language instinct. What remained to be done was to find the methods and opportunities to turn that instinct into words. But who found the first words? Who finds new words today? We know that Shakespeare put into print at least two thousand new words, but the majority of words come out of the crowd. An”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“It is easy with hindsight to say that “obviously” English has survived. But hindsight is the bane of history. It is corrupting and distorting and pays no respect to the way life is really lived — forwards, generally blindly, full of accidents, fortunes and misfortunes, patternless and often adrift. Easy with hindsight to say we would beat Napoleon at Waterloo: only by a whisker, according to the honest general who did it. Easy to say we would win the Second World War: ask those who watched the dogfights of the Battle of Britain in Kent in 1940. Easy to say the Berlin Wall was bound to fall. Which influential commentator or body of opinion said so in the 1980s? Hindsight is the easy way to mop up the mess which we call history; it is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled. As often as not, when the dust was flying, no one at the time knew what the outcome might be.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English

“Once again we see not only additions to the English word-hoard but new ideas being introduced or current ideas being given a name – ‘humanity’, ‘pollute’, which then, as words often do, took on a larger and more complex life. New words are new worlds. You call them up and if they are strong enough, they keep in step with change and along the way describe more and more, provide new insights, evolve on the tongue and on the page.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“That’s the beauty of it. That was the sweet revenge which English took on French: it not only anglicised it, it used the invasion to increase its own strength; it looted the looters, plundered those who had plundered, out of weakness brought forth strength. For ‘answer’ is not quite ‘respond’; now they have almost independent lives. ‘Liberty’ isn’t always ‘freedom’. Shades of meaning, representing shades of thought, were massively absorbed into our language and our imagination at that time.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“to lose any language is to lose a unique way of knowing life.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“English was emerging from the tribal Babel as a resourceful tongue, but it had no great written language and without that it would be for ever condemned to the limbo of vernaculars all over the world whose attempt to live on by sound alone has often doomed them to insularity, then to irrelevance, finally to oblivion.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“And yet, floating above it all is a language which is not Standard Pronunciation, nor anything like Ideal Pronunciation, but it is nevertheless, as Shaw implies in a letter, the ruling tongue. “It is perfectly easy,” he wrote, “to find a speaker whose speech will be accepted in every part of the English-speaking world as valid 18 carat oral currency . . . if a man pronounces in that way, he will be eligible as far as speech is concerned for the post of Lord Chief Justice, Chancellor of Oxford, Archbishop of Canterbury, Emperor, President or Toast Master at the Mansion House.” It was that eighteen-carat voice, on the back of unparalleled industrial wealth, which took English yet more intensively over the globe.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“Sir William’s work shows, I think, the great respect the small intruding country had at that time for the awesome mass of a subcontinent of which it was edging into control.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“In its easiness of grammatical construction, in its paucity of inflexion, in its almost total disregard of the distinctions of gender excepting those of nature, in the simplicity and precision of its terminations and auxiliary verbs, not less than the majesty, vigour and copiousness of its expression, our mother-tongue seems well adapted by organization to become the language of the world.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“Estuary English creeps in and shows no sign of ebbing.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, will require that it should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“Thou art a monument without a tomb And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“The perfect embodiment of the courtier-poet was a heroic nobleman born in one of the great houses of England, Penshurst Place, in 1554, and dead a mere thirty-one years later on a battlefield fighting the Spanish in the Netherlands: Sir Philip Sidney. He achieved lasting fame for giving his water bottle to another wounded soldier with the words “Thy need is greater than mine.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“England was seeking a literature to reflect its newly enriched status and it was to the courtiers, the knights of Elizabeth’s entourage, that the role fell to turn the English language into literature. The gentleman-poet was called up, he who could handle the pen with as much skill as the sword; it was his turn now to play his part in the adventure of English. The courtier wrote for pleasure, for show and for the love of writing; it was his plumage, playing with the language, seeking lines belonging only to him, looking for immortality in verse.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language