Shakespeare is my homeboy

I am currently reading Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue: English and how it got that way. It is a slow read and I am only 89 pages into but I have already learned so much! Here are some random facts and quotes from the book:


"Robert Burchfield editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, announced that American English and English English are drifting apart so rapidly that within 200 years the two nations won't be able to understand each other at all."


Eskimos have fifty words for types of snow.


"This is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English."


"Children almost always learn to say no before yes and in before on, and all children go through a phase in which they become oddly fascinated with the idea of "gone" and "all gone"." Hugh anyone?


"Irish Gaelic possesses no equivalent of yes and no."


"English speakers dread silence. Studies have shown that when a pause reaches 4 seconds, one or more of the conversationalists will invariably blurt something - a fatuous comment on the weather, a startled cry of "Gosh, is that the time?" - rather than let the silence extend to a fifth second."


When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of falling, that is called a mycologic jerk.


And finally...Shakespeare is my homeboy...he invented over 1,600 words...including critical, leapfrog, majestic, obscene, radiance, dwindle, countless, EXCELLENT, hint, lonely.