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Bill Bryson on rising levels of stupidity

As Ed. told you earlier today -- see previous post -- [not the one with the video of the Swazi reed dance! Ed.] -- I am writing a review of Bill Bryson's latest opus The Road to Little Dribbling (Penguin Random House/Doubleday 2015). Some people will call it a travel book, but in reality it's a trenchant commentary on the decline of culture and just about everything else, disguised as a travel book. One of the things decried by Mr. Bryson is the descent of modern society into a deep and abiding stupidity. He didn't write that; I did. Here's what he wrote, pages 226-227.

I was seated at a window with a good view of the Jeremy Clarkson poster that I had noted earlier [see previous post] and this got me to thinking about stupidity again, in the universal sense. I had recently read about something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is named after two academics at Cornell University in New York State, who first described it. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is basically being too stupid to know how stupid you are. That sounds like a pretty good description of the world to me.

So what I began to wonder was this: what if we are all getting stupid at more or less the same rate and we don't realize it because we are all declining together? You might argue that we'd see a general fall in IQ scores, but what if it's not the kind of deterioration that shows up in IQ tests? What if it were reflected in just, say, poor judgement or diminished taste? That would explain the success of Mrs Brown's Boys, for one thing.

We all know that regular exposure to lead can seriously impair brain function, yet it took decades for scientists to figure that out. What if something even more insidious is poisoning our brains from some other part of our daily lives? The number of chemicals in use in the developed world was more than 82,000 at the last count, and most of them - 86 per cent, according to one estimate - have never been tested for their effect on humans.

Every day, to take just one example, we call consume or absorb substantial amounts of bisphenols and phthalates, which are found in food packaging. These may pass harmlessly through us or they may be doing to our brains what a microwave oven does to a tub of baked beans. We have no idea, but if you look at what's on TV on a typical weeknight, you have to wonder. That's all I'm saying.

Bill Bryson on declining standards of punctuation and grammar

Ed. here. Bill Bryson, best known for his travel books, has also written two fine books on the development and use of the English language. Mother Tongue and Made in America occupy positions of honour in Walt's working library. Mr. Bryson is also a stickler for proper usage of our language, as witness the following excerpt from his latest book, The Road to Little Dribbling (Penguin Random House/Doubleday 2015). Walt's working on a review, but showed me this passage (pages 220-222), which I couldn't wait to share with you.

On the platform at Cambridge station was a poster for a Jeremy Clarkson book. It had a photo of Clarkson looking adorably doleful and a caption that read: 'Dads. Everything they say. Everything they do. Everything they wear. Its all completely wrong.' Oh, the wit. But note the absence of the apostrophe in 'its'. I know it is way too much to ask that Jeremy Clarkson should take an interest in the literacy of his posters, but surely someone at Penguin ought to care.

We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but evidently don't realize that there are fundamentals. Many people...seem to think that capitalization and marks of punctuation are condiments that you sprinkle indiscriminately through any collection of words. Here is a headline, exactly as presented, from a magazine ad for a private school in York: 'Ranked by the daily Telegraph the top Northern Co-Educational day and Boarding School for Academic results'. All those capital letters are just random. Does anyone really think that the correct rendering of the newspaper is 'the daily Telegraph'? Is it really possible to be that unobservant?

Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Not long ago, I received an email from someone at the Department for Children, Schools and Families asking me to take part in a campaign to help raise appreciation for the quality of teaching in the UK. Here is the opening line of the message exactly as it was sent to me: 'Hi Bill. Hope alls well. Here at the Department of Children Schools and Families...'

In the space of one line, fourteen words, the author has made three elemental punctuation errors (two missing commas, one missing apostrophe; I am not telling you more than that) and got the name of her own department wrong - this from a person whose job it is to promote education. In a similar spirit, I received a letter not long ago from a paediatric surgeon inviting me to speak at a conference. The writer used the word children's twice in her invitation, spelling it two different ways and getting it wrong both times. This was a children's specialist working in a children's hospital. How long do you have to be exposed to a word, how central must it be to your working life, to notice how it is spelled?

People everywhere have abandoned whole elements of grammatical English, and I don't understand it.I was watching a Brian Cox television documentary in which he was standing in a field in Mexico talking about bombardier beetles when he said: 'The bombardier beetle and me, and in fact every living thing you can see, are exposed to the same threat... Me and my friend the beetle have both reached the same solution.' Now don't get me wrong. I have great respect for Brian Cox. He has a brain so big that it crosses whole time zones, and he is normally impeccable with the language, so why on earth would he say 'the bombardier beetle and me' when it is surely more natural, and clearly more respectable, to say 'the bombardier beetle and I'?

Soon after this, I watched a documentary by another eminent young scientist, Adam Rutherford, and he said: 'Now I've got just 33 vertebrae in my spinal column, but Belle here [a boa constrictor] has got 304, and the amazing thing is it's the same handful of genes that determine how many vertebrae both me and her have.'

Then I was watching a repeat of Outnumbered, which had this snatch of dialogue in it:
          Outnumbered kid: 'Why do I have to look after Karen?'
          Hugh Dennis: 'Because me and Mum and Ben are going to be at Ben's parents' evening.'
Hugh Dennis was educated at Cambridge in real life, and he plays a teacher who should really know better.

Then I heard Samantha Cameron, wife of the Prime Minister, say to a television interviewer, 'Me and the kids help to keep him grounded.'

So here is all I am saying about this. Stop it.

Strangest place name we've seen this year

Walt has a fondness for strange place names. This he shares with, among others, Bill Bryson, who has recorded a lengthy list of US names in Made in America (1994). They include Eek AK, Zyzx Springs CA, and Rabbit Hash, Bug and OK, all in Kentucky.

I have a vague recollection of a similar list in Notes from a Small Island (1996) but can't put my finger on it right now. A Google search, however, turns up the "Ultimate List of Funny and Rude British Place Names" on a website called Anglotopia. Who but the Brits could come up with cringe-worthy names as Shittington, Lickers and Crapstone? Yet people must live there.

Although it's one of the four great English-speaking countries, has relatively few funny places names, once you leave aside those of aboriginal origin, like Wooloomaloo (site of the famous university) and Wagga Wagga.

The brings us to Canada, which has its fair share and more, since some of the French place names are humorous too. Two of Walt's French favourites are St-Louis-du-Ha-Ha and Mille Vaches, both in Québec. One of Walt's agents (who is not gay) lives near Fruitland ON. Some of the funniest, though are in Newfoundland and Labrador, where you can visit Blow Me Down, Come By Chance, Bumblebee Bight, and the ever-popular Dildo.

But staid old Ontario is not to be outdone, particularly in the United Empire Loyalist region in the southeast of that province. The following story, only slightly edited here for dramatic effect, appeared in Ottawa-area papers today.

Ontario Provincial Police today charged a woman with theft of a motor vehicle, fleeing police, possession of property obtained by crime over $5,000 and failing to comply with conditions of an undertaking, after she allegedly fled in a stolen truck full of ice cream.

The OPP say the woman, 24, stole the refrigerated delivery truck from a Shell gas station in Perth ON, about 80 kilometres southwest of Ottawa, as the driver made deliveries on Thursday morning. After searching the area, police officers found the truck heading down Wilson Street West in Perth. It finally stopped at a quarry on Highway 7, east of Perth.

The woman was scheduled to appear for a bail hearing on Thursday. She is a resident of Bastard and South Burgess Township, located south of Perth.

Walt wonders if people who live in that township have extra-wide drivers licences to accommodate its full name. Or do they just call it "Bastard etc Twp" for short? Whatever they call it, it's bound to finish on the podium in our Funny Place Name of the Year contest. Readers are invited to submit their entries in the comment box below. Prizes TBA.

Further reading: "How about a better name for Biggar?" (WWW 24/12/13). And let's not overlook Tisdale SK, "Land of rape and honey ???" (WWW 21/4/15). Come to think of it, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan sounds pretty funny too, but those names are derived from aboriginal languages, so they don't count.

Puzzling address

A rebus is an allusional device that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. Very simple example: the letter H + [picture of an ear] = "hear" or "here". A more complex example is this "escort card" dating from about 1865.

A gentleman would present it to an unescorted lady at a social, for instance. It asks, "May I see you home my dear". Geddit?

Rebuses used to appear as puzzles in the funny pages of the newspapers back when Walt was a boy [before the earth's crust cooled. Ed.] Do newspapers have funny pages any more? Do newspapers even exist any more?

If you've been waiting a long time for the chance to solve a rebus, here's one. It has been reported (by Bill Bryson) that the United States Post Office -- not the latter-day USPS -- successfully delivered an envelope bearing only this address:

WOOD

JOHN

MASS

Can you decipher it? Answer sometime next week...

Book review: Bill Bryson's latest pleases and amazes

"It was one hell of a summer." So begins the last clause of the last sentence of the last chapter (bar the epilogue) of Bill Bryson's latest tour de force, One Summer: America 1927 (Doubleday 2013), which Walt recommends most highly.

Bill Bryson is one of my favourite writers. But it must be said that the quality and "interest quotient" of his earlier works (especially his travel books) is more consistently good than that of his more recent writing. Of all his books, I can think of only three that I haven't particularly enjoyed. Two of those -- A Short History of Nearly Everything and At Home -- are among the more recent.

So it was with a bit of doubt that I laid out the spondulix (Bryson would love that word) for One Summer, wondering if I might later suffer from buyer's remorse. I didn't.

Although the dust jacket illustration of the Spirit of St. Louis, a baseball player and a flapper should have tipped me off, I also wondered what happened in the summer of 1927 that merited a whole long(ish) book. Here, from the last chapter (bar the epilogue) is the answer.

Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. The Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash. Al Capone enjoyed his last summer of eminence. The Jazz Singer was filmed. Television was created. Radio came of age. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. President Coolidge chose not to run. Work began on Mount Rushmore. The Mississippi flooded as it never had before. A madman in Michigan blew up a school and killed forty-four people in the worst slaughter of children in American history. Henry Ford stopped making the Model T and promised to stop insulting Jews. And a kid from Minnesota flew across an ocean and captivated the planet in a way it had never been captivated before.

The kid, of course, was Charles Lindbergh. One Summer begins and ends with him. In between, Mr. Bryson manages -- this is the amazing part -- to tie together all of the events and personalities mentioned above, as well as countless others of lesser note. The depth and detail of his narrative is astounding. Besides being a voracious reader, I believe he must have had at least one very good research assistant. [Hey! Is that a dig at me? Ed.]

It is a tribute to Bill Bryson's skill as a writer that, although One Summer runs to 458 pages -- plus notes, suggestions for further reading, a bibliography and index! -- I found it a fast-paced and entertaining read. It's part social history, part biography, and part pure story-telling. And, as they say, the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Best new book I've read this year.

Post scriptum et caveat: It must be said that some fairly large chunks of One Summer -- particularly the story of Charles Lindbergh -- have been, errr, recycled from Made in America (Martin Secker & Warburg, 1994). But since Made in America antedates the travel books that made Bill Bryson famous, many of you may not have read it. And even if you did, Mr. Bryson is such a good storyteller that you won't mind a rerun.

English brand names that didn't travel well

As readers of his admirable works Mother Tongue and Made in America will know, Bill Bryson is a cunning linguist.  His fascination with the evolution and usage of the English language is boundless.

His sense of humour shines through both both books, particularly when he writes about how English is mispronounced, mistranslated and misunderstood in other part of the world. Here, from Mother Tongue, is his example of brand names which are inoffensive in English, but take on negative connotations when used in countries where English is not the native tongue.

Some idea of the scope of the problem can be seen in the experience of a British company when it decided to sell its vintage port, Cockburn's Dry Tang, in Scandinavia. When it didn't sell well in Sweden the company investigated and learned that "tang" means "seaweed" in Swedish, and clearly the name "dry seaweed" was not conjuring up the requisite image of quality and premium taste that would lead Swedes to buy it by the sackful.

So, at the suggestion of the Swedish importers, the company changed the name on the label to Dry Cock, which sounds very silly to English speakers, but which was a big hit with the Swedes.

However, sales immediately plummeted in Denmark. Urgent investigation showed that "cock" there signifies, of all things, the female genitalia. So yet another name had to be devised. Such are the hazards of international marketing.

Presented to you as a Saturday Smile...

So, there's a new bad English fad

So... since when has it become acceptable to start a sentence with "So..."?

Examples: "So... the stock market was up nearly 100 points today, in spite of large losses in the energy sector." That sentence was uttered by a supposedly educated business commentator on a TV newscast. But you hear it in everyday conversation too: "So... I'm walkin' down the street, eh, and this really big guy bumps into me..." Perhaps the speaker was not so well educated. [Certainly a Canuck! Ed.] Walt has even seen it in print (on the Net) in a post on a forum for... wait for it... English teachers! "So, I found a job in China, but now I changed my mind..."

My guess is that there has been so much criticism, on WWW and elsewhere, of the use of "like" as a "pause word" that people who wish to sound as if they've advanced beyond primary school have settled on "so" as a "higher-class" alternative. They must think "So..." sounds better than "Like...". It doesn't! So, let's stop using "So..." at the beginning of a sentence to signify, "Hey, I'm gonna talk now."

While I'm at it, may I plead, yet again, for the teaching of English vocabulary in journalism schools. Will those who write for the lamestream media please stop using words of whose meaning they are unsure! Examples:
"wrestle" for "wrest" - "The Iraqi army is trying to wrestle Tikrit back from ISIS"
"fulsome" for "full" - "A more fulsome report is expected tomorrow"

As Walt sees it, the problem is that "writers" no longer feel any need or to desire to be readers, first. They don't know less common words, like "fulsome" and "wrest", because they haven't read them, properly used, in the works of people possessed of vocabularies of more than 1000 words.

No, I'm not talking only about 19th-century writers, although Charles Dickens would certainly have known the proper meanings of "wrest" and "fulsome". There are plenty of modern writers, on both sides of the Atlantic, who have great (in the senses of "large" and "excellent") vocabularies. Looking at my bookshelf, I see: William F. Buckley, Bill Bryson, Graham Greene, Studs Terkel and of course Hunter S. Thompson. HST might not have used a word like "fulsome", but I'm sure he knew what it means.

Moral: Read first, then write.
Footnote: I except (not "accept") newsreaders from my criticism. They are only bingo-callers and meat puppets. They read only the autocue. The less-than-literate clods who write what's on the autocue are the real villains.

Updates and miscellany

As I write, Flt Lt Ace McCool and his crew are winging their way eastward to Mali. They are flying the Royal Canadian Air Force's backup Globemaster, not the one that got stuck on the runway at CFB Trenton this morning. That's all ye know and all ye need to know about the capabilities of the Canadian Armed Forces.

Quick, what do you call the 600th anniversary of something? The 200th is a bicentennial. The 300th is a tricentennial. After that it all gets a little hazy. I hope a reader will enlighten me, though, because this year marks the 600th anniversary of a significant development in English Common Law. Read on.

How are you described in your will or on your title deed. In much of the UK, USA and Canada you are probably identified by your given and surnames, as well as your place of residence and your occupation. Like this: Walter Whiteman, of the City of Springfield and County of Nassau, Orthoepist.

We owe that very specific form of description to the Statute of Additions, enacted in England in 1413. [Yes, Kramer. It's "statute", not "statue". Ed.] Happy whatever-ennial.

In my review of Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue, I pointed out that the author speaks -- rather a lot, actually -- of two of the Anglo-Saxon words for the female genitalia. The more common of the two was, in Chaucer's day, relatively harmless, certainly not the C-bomb that it has become today. Speaking of C-bombs, though, Bryson tells us later in the same book that the corresponding word in Danish is "cock". Can any Danish-speaking reader verify this? Sounds like a cock-and-bull story to me.

"Mother Tongue": a great book about the world's greatest language

WARNING! "Dirty words"!
This book review contains two four-letter Anglo-Saxon monosyllables relating to a part of the female anatomy. If you're the kind of person who never looked up "dirty words" in the dictionary as a kid, read no further.

Someone who speaks several languages is multilingual.
Someone who speaks two languages is bilingual.
Someone who speaks only one language is English.

Indeed. English... or American. Most other countries seem to have accepted the altogether sensible concept that having a second (and third or fourth) language enriches a person, figuratively if not literally.

Not native English speakers. Those who are fortunate enough to have the language of Shakespeare as their mother tongue seem to subscribe to the belief of an American evangelical preacher who told his flock that "if English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!"

Many English speakers seem to think that if anyone's going to learn a new language, let it be the NON-English speakers. And the rest of the world seems to agree. In China alone, there are more people learning -- or attempting to learn -- English than there are English speakers in America. 99% of them will wind up speaking Chinglish, but at least they're trying.

I am fortunate to be a native speaker of English. I learned it at my mother's knee and other low joints. My mother was a teacher of the Queen's English, the queen being Victoria. From her -- my mother, not the queen -- I inherited a high regard for proper English usage. And from reading the work of good writers I developed admiration for clever and creative writing.

By "good writers" I mean the likes of Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, P.J. O'Rourke, and the inimitable Bill Bryson. One thinks of Mr. Bryson as a travel writer; indeed, most of his better books have been about travel. (African Diary sucked, but that was a charitable project and I think Bryson didn't put a lot of time or effort into it.)

But Bryson has more strings to his bow than travel writing. He is quite the cunning linguist, with a keen interest in the English language. And he has written a fine book about it, called Mother Tongue (William Morrow 1990; Penguin 1991).

Mother Tongue is not a dull book of rules for English grammar and spelling. Although it does contain chapters on both topics, it is both fascinating and laugh-out-loud funny. It is filled with trivia about not just things (words) but people.

For instance, Bryson paints an unflattering portrait of Noah Webster, who appears to have been quite an unpleasant man.

He worked tirelessly turning out endless hectoring books and tracts, as well as working on the more or less constant revision of his spelling and dictionaries. In between time he wrote impassioned letters to congressmen, dabbled in politics, proffered unwanted advice to presidents, led his church choir, lectured to large audiences, helped found Amherst College, and produced a sanitized version of the Bible in which Onan doesn't spill his seed but simple 'frustrates his purpose', in which men don't have testicles but rather 'peculiar members', and in which women don't have wombs (or evidently anything else with which to contribute to the reproductive process).

Of course Bryson does talk about the marvellous English vocabulary, about the words... All of the words, including two words for the female pudenda. Readers of Chaucer, he tells us, will frequently encounter "cunt", one of the seven words George Carlin said you can't say on TV.

Brits will know, but Americans may not, that there is a slightly milder Anglo-Saxon monosyllabic synonym, "twat", which was used by such illustrious writers as the poet Robert Browning, in Pippa Passes.
Then, owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister's moods
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry.

Although it had the same meaning in 1841 as it does now, Browning somehow thought "twat" meant a piece of headgear for nuns. Bryson writes:
The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining the mistake to him.

Walt agrees entirely with Ruth Rendell, whose review in the Sunday Times calls Mother Tongue "anecdotal, full of revelations, and with not one dull paragraph". Lovers of the English language will love this book.

Footnote: George Carlin said there are no dirty words, only dirty thoughts.

Book review: In the Empire of Genghis Khan

What is it about Britain that makes its people such tireless travellers and explorers? Perhaps it's that Britain is so small and -- let's face it -- dreary. Want to climb mountains? The highest is Mount Snowdon, nice enough but merely a pimple on the face of America or China. Want to go to the end of the world? In Cornwall you will find Land's End, which on an excitement scale of 1 to 10 rates -1. But I digress...

Britain has produced far more than her share of great travellers and travel writers. My list of great American travel writers would include Mark Twain, Paul Theroux (his novels suck, though) and Bill Bryson, who has taken up residence in Old Blighty so is only half-American.

My list of British travel writers worth reading is much longer: Graham Greene, Redmond O'Hanlon, Christina Dodwell, Jan Morris, Dervla Murphy, Bruce Chatwin, Cash Peters (see "Book Review: Gullible's Travels"), Tony Horwitz (see "Book Review: Baghdad Without a Map"), and others whose names I'll remember as soon as I post this.

Now let me add Stanley Stewart, author of In the Empire of Genghis Khan: A Journey Among Nomads (Flamingo 2001). Having often been called "a perfect little Mongol" by his mother, Stewart developed a fascination with the Mongols, the Golden Horde and Genghis Khan, which led him to attempt a ride (on horseback) across the homeland of the Mongol Horde's descendants.

His journey took him a thousand miles across Mongolia, from Olgii to Dadal, near which Genghis Khan is rumoured to have been buried. No-one knows for sure, as every last one of those involved in preparing his final resting place and conveying him thither was slaughtered.

In the Empire of Genghis Khan is roughly one-third history (see preceding paragraph), one-third descriptive geography (lots of pretty word pictures and a handful of photos), and one-third ethnography. It is full of bizarre encounters and colourful characters. The chapter entitled "The Wedding Battle" is not to be missed. Here's a summary: "A wedding receiption where you got to give your new in-laws a good thumping was the kind of thing that people in the West could only dream about."

Stewart's book is, as the cover blurb promises "a thrilling tale of adventure and an evocative portrait of a medieval land marooned in a modern world". If, like Walt, you are a fan of the travel adventure genre, you're sure to like it.

Book review: At Home with Bill Bryson

A couple of years ago, Bill Bryson, best known for his travel writing, penned A Short History of Nearly Everything. It was a disappointment, as seems inevitable considering the scope of the know-it-all title.

Nothing deterred, the American humourist and anglophile now presents At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Doubleday 2010). Mr. Bryson lives in a Victorian rectory in Norfolk, England. He takes us on a guided tour of the house and garden, pausing in each room to discourse on whatever subject the name of the room calls to his fertile mind.

For instance, in the dining room the author speaks of food, diet and the changes in people's eating habits over the centuries. The bathroom provokes a history of hygiene, or lack thereof. And the bedroom suggests sex, sleep and death.

What we get here is not just studies (perhaps too serious a word) in history, but archaeology, sociology and a generous helping of biography too. It would be hard to write about English scientists, inventors and architects without revealing some of the eccentricities for which the English are famous.*

The compendium which results from Mr. Bryson's curiosity and love of trivia is considerably more pleasing than A Short History of Nearly Everything. At Home makes clear the connection between what happens in the world at large and the structure and content of our houses, from wall to wall and from basement to attic.

At Home is not laugh-out-loud funny, like some of Bryson's travel writing, but it is far from being the dull academic tome the sub-title suggests. Walt recommends it highly.

* Walt can't resist giving one example. Bryson relates the stinginess of an 18th-century Duke of Marlborough, who was so parsimonious that, when writing, he refused to dot his i's, to save ink!

More things to think about

Last month I gave you "Some things to think about", some ponderable questions to take your mind off the burning issues of the day, like whether the Toronto Maple Leafs will make the playoffs. (Don't trouble yourself. The answer is NO. Lifetime pct: .974)

Here, from Bill Bryson's latest book, At Home, are two rodent-related factoids about which you can think when your mind is otherwise empty.

Do you have mice in your house? Many of us do. Did you know that every mouse excretes about fifty (50) fecal pellets per day? Not just in houses, but in food storage areas and places where food is processed.

Because of the impossibility of achieving perfection in storage, hygiene regulations in most places allow up to two mouse turds per pint of grain. Bear that in mind next time you bite into a slice of whole grain bread.

How about rats? Rats are more common in and around our houses than we would like to think. Even the best homes sometimes have them. One of the two most common varieties in our part of the world is rattus rattus, known to us as the "roof rat".

Why do you suppose rattus rattus is called what it is called? Because it likes to be up high, in places like trees ... and attics. As you lie in bed late at night, listening to the pitter patter of little feet across your bedroom ceiling, think about what it might be. A mouse? Hmmm... maybe....

Walt's review of At Home will appear soon. Watch this space.