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22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.
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Bill Bryson |
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We live in a world that doesn't altogether seem to want us here.
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Bill Bryson |
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Charles Darwin, driven to desperation by a mysterious lifelong malady that left him chronically lethargic, routinely draped himself with electrified zinc chains, doused his body with vinegar, and glumly underwent hours of pointless tingling in the hope that it would effect some improvement. It never did. The
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Bill Bryson |
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blueprint as a metaphor for a design or plan is much overworked. If the temptation to use it is irresistible, at least remember that a blueprint is a completed plan, not a preliminary one.
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Bill Bryson |
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needless to say is a harmless enough expression, but it often draws attention to the fact that you really didn't need to say it.
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Bill Bryson |
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Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is--well, we've covered that. To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. The
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Bill Bryson |
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in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: "In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time." Of"
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Bill Bryson |
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Lucy constituted only 28 per cent of a half skeleton (and only about 20 per cent of a full one).
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Bill Bryson |
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At all events, rather less is known about Lucy than is generally supposed. It isn't even actually known that she was a female.
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Bill Bryson |
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Andrea di Pietro della Gondola, who in 1524, aged not quite sixteen, arrived in Vicenza
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Bill Bryson |
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Many fishermen "fin" sharks--that is, slice their fins off, then dump them back into the water to die."
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Bill Bryson |
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The World Wildlife Fund estimated in 1994 that the number of sharks killed each year was between 40 million and 70 million. As
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Bill Bryson |
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well over a million years ago, some new, comparatively modern, upright beings left Africa and boldly spread out across much of the globe.
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Bill Bryson |
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journal Science in 1980 contending that women are genetically inferior at mathematics.
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Bill Bryson |
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The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is curious to reflect that we have computers that can effortlessly compute pi to 5,000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference between time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana or that in the English-speaking world to make up a story, to make up one's face, and to make up after a fight are all quite separate things.
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Bill Bryson |
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Flies are of course always irksome, but the Australian variety distinguishes itself with its very particular persistence. If an Australian fly wants to be up your nose or in your ear, there is no discouraging him. Flick at him as you will and each time he will jump out of range and come straight back. It is simply not possible to deter him.
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Bill Bryson |
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Oh, you can trust the studies well enough, generally speaking. What you can't trust are the sweeping conclusions that people often attach to them.
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Bill Bryson |
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Sir Thomas More came up with absurdity, acceptance, exact, explain, and exaggerate.
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Bill Bryson |
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If you count proper nouns, the word in English with the most varied spellings is air with a remarkable thirty-eight: Aire, ayr, heir, e'er, ere, and so on.
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Bill Bryson |
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7588f80
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We have been gulled by the ease of air travel and other forms of communication into thinking that the world is not all that big, but at ground level, where researchers must work, it is actually enormous.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions--like trusteeship, which consists of a Nordic stem (trust), combined with a French affix (ee), married to an Old English root (ship). Other languages cannot do this. We should be proud of ourselves for our ingenuity and yet even now authorities commonly attack almost any new construction as ugly or barbaric.
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Bill Bryson |
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No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The New York Times once had a boss who wouldn't allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning . . . and so on.
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Bill Bryson |
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An American going into a London department store with a shopping list consisting of vest, knickers, suspenders, jumper, and pants would in each instance be given something dramatically different from what he expected. (To wit, a British vest is an American undershirt. Our vest is their waistcoat. Their knickers are our panties. To them a jumper is a sweater, while what we call a jumper is to them a pinafore dress. Our suspenders are their b..
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Bill Bryson |
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I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive. 1. Because you feel that the rules of English ought to conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago. 2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority of the last 200 years, even at the cost of composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted..
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Bill Bryson |
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meat was any food (the sense is preserved in "meat and drink" and in the English food mincemeat, which contains various fruits but no meat in the sense that we now use it)."
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Bill Bryson |
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85 percent of the 30,000 Anglo-Saxon words died out under the influence of the Danes and Normans. That means that only about 4,500 Old English words survived--about 1 percent of the total number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary. And yet those surviving words are among the most fundamental words in English: man, wife, child, brother, sister, live, fight, love, drink, sleep, eat, house, and so on.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.
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Bill Bryson |
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Language is more fashion than science
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linguistics
language
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Bill Bryson |
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The white people never looked at the Aborigines, and the Aborigines never looked at the white people. The two races seemed to inhabit separate but parallel universes. I felt as if I was the only person who could see both groups at once.
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Bill Bryson |
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In 1606, a Spanish mariner named Luis Vaez de Torres sailed across the Pacific from South America and straight into the narrow channel (now called the Torres Strait) that separates Australia from New Guinea without having the faintest idea that he had just done the nautical equivalent of threading a needle.
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Bill Bryson |
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Sumatra,
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Bill Bryson |
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Thirty-six years later the Dutchman Abel Tasman was sent to look for the fabled South Land and managed to sail 2,000 miles along the underside of Australia without detecting that a substantial land mass lay just over the left-hand horizon.
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Bill Bryson |
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Trinil skullcap.
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Bill Bryson |
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They knew there was something there - possibly a biggish island like New Guinea, possibly a mass of smaller islands like the East Indies - and they called this amorphous entity New Holland, but none equated it with the long-sought southern continent.
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Bill Bryson |
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About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it - 99.9 per cent of the mass of the solar system21 - went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All o..
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Bill Bryson |
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It really doesn't pay to go back and look again at the things that once delighted you, because it's unlikely they will delight you now.
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Bill Bryson |
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Years ago, when my wife and I were dating, she took me on a day trip to the seaside at Brighton. It was my first exposure to the British at play in a marine environment. It was a fairly warm day--I remember the sun came out for whole moments at a time--and large numbers of people were in the sea. They were shrieking with what I took to be pleasure, but now realize was agony. Naively, I pulled off my T-shirt and sprinted into the water. It w..
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Bill Bryson |
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Fears have been raised that in their enthusiasm scientists might inadvertently create a black hole or even something called "strange quarks," which could, theoretically, interact with other subatomic particles and propagate uncontrollably. If you are reading this, that hasn't happened."
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Bill Bryson |
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Clearly there was a need for some inspired and clever experimentation, and happily the age produced a young person with the diligence and aptitude to undertake it.
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Bill Bryson |
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Consider just one of those stories that did make it into the New York Times in 1997, though buried away in the odd-sock drawer of Section C. In January of that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese..
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Bill Bryson |
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All Australians are required by law to vote in federal elections, including residents of the Northern Territory.
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Bill Bryson |
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They simply exist," Attenborough adds, "testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake."
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Bill Bryson |