Melvyn Bragg > Quotes

“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

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“In 1781, John Witherspoon, a Scotsman who was President of Princeton, wrote, convincingly: The vulgar Americans speak much better than the vulgar in Great Britain for a very obvious reason viz. that being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology. There is a greater difference in dialect between one county and another in Britain than there is between one state and another in America.”
― 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

“Yet it seemed to Bega that if she could continue to read, which had come so easily to her... then that would be a life which take every ounce of her strength. She wanted no less. She loved to see the shapes and strokes of line and turn them into words: she loved the idea of battling against enemies external and internal and all her will being consumed in that battle.”
― Melvynn Bragg

“Poets that lasting marble seek Must carve in Latin or in Greek: We write in sand, our language grows And like the tide, our work o’erflows.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“Before the fifteenth century was out, William Caxton had printed two editions of The Canterbury Tales and they have never been out of print since. They have been enjoyed, imitated, copied, re-translated, put on stage, screen and radio, and generations have rightly regarded Chaucer as the father and founding genius of English literature.”
― 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

“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

“encouraged to wipe that dialect off our lips.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“anhydrohepseterion” (a machine for stewing potatoes in their own juice).”
― 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. Occasionally there is desperate resuscitation from a few survivors who know that to lose any language is to lose a unique way of knowing life. Only writing preserves a language.”
― 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

“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

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

“As when we gun discharge Although the bore be ne’er so large Before the flame the muzzle burst Just at the breech it flashes first; So from my lord his passion broke, He farted first and then he spoke. [Swift]”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“Squanto engineered the survival of the Pilgrim Fathers and it was because of his help that an English-speaking society eventually prevailed there. Their own language had saved them.”
― 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

“Sheridan hit the nerve. In one of his lectures, in 1762, he wrote: “Pronunciation . . . is a sort of proof that a person has kept good company, and on that account is sought after by all, who wish to be considered as fashionable people or members of the beau monde.” He took no prisoners. “All other dialects are sure marks, either of a provincial, rustic, pedantic or mechanic education; and therefore have some degree of disgrace annexed to them.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“One thing this shows, I think, at its simplest, is that language is no respecter of persons in that it will find birth wherever and whenever it can. There is very often something wonderfully anonymous about the whole process: a pimp can coin a word as lasting as that of a poet, a street hawker as a statesman, a farmer as a scholar, a foul mouth as a Latinist, vulgar as refined, illiterate as schooled. Language leaps out of mouths regardless of class, sex, age, or education: it sees something that needs to be said or saved in a word and it pounces. In the American west it pounced for more than fifty years.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“In Tristram Shandy there is a passage which describes how two nuns, believing that the only way to shift an obstinate mule was to say “bugger,” are hampered by the knowledge that to utter such a word was most sinful. They split it up between them. Neither syllable on its own could possibly be sinful, so one shouts “bou, bou, bou” and the other “ger, ger, ger.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“One [reason] is that children in school, contrary to the usage and custom of all other nations, are compelled to abandon their own language and carry on their lessons and their affairs in French, and have done so since the Normans first came to England. Also the children of gentlemen are taught to speak French from the time that they are rocked in their cradle and learn to speak and play with a child’s trinket, and rustic men will make themselves like gentlemen and seek with great industry to speak French to be more highly thought of.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

“We’ll begin with a box and the plural is boxes. But the plural of ox should be oxen not oxes. Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese. Yet the plural of mouse should never be meese. You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice. But the plural of house is houses not hice. If the plural of man is always called men, Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen? The cow in a plural may be cows or kine, But the plural of vow is vows and not vine. And I speak of foot and you show me your feet, But I give you a boot . . . would a pair be called beet? . . .”
― 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