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17efcdd
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I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at the horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, 'Yeah, I've shit in the woods
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Bill Bryson |
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cd53dd1
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All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods.
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Bill Bryson |
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2088582
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Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know. They have counted every word he wrote, logged every dib and jot. They can tell us (and have done so) that Shakespeare's works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks; that ears are spoken of 401 times in his plays; that dunghill is used 10 times and dullard twice; that his characters refer to love 2,259 tim..
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Bill Bryson |
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f4a3e40
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Returning to my book, I learned that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country. It was a wonderful evening.
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Bill Bryson |
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e59fa7b
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His real gift was as a phrasemaker. "Shakespeare's language," says Stanley Wells, "has a quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language." Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all de..
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Bill Bryson |
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7be534d
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The inhabitants of England in the age of Chaucer commonly used an expression, to be in hide and hair, meaning to be lost or beyond discovery. But then it disappears from the written record for four hundred years before resurfacing, suddenly and unexpectedly, in America in 1857 as neither hide nor hair. It is dearly unlikely that the phrase went into a linguistic coma for four centuries. So who was quietly preserving it for four hundred year..
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Bill Bryson |
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f27532d
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Facts are surprisingly delible things, and in four hundred years a lot of them simply fade away. One of the most popular plays of the age was Arden of Faversham, but no one now knows who wrote it. When an author's identity is known, that knowledge is often marvelously fortuitous.
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Bill Bryson |
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78750a2
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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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c77b251
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It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man fr..
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Bill Bryson |
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c3ffe37
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the Bogdanov theory excited debate among physicists as to whether it was twaddle, a work of genius, or a hoax. 'Scientifically, it's clearly more or less complete nonsense, Columbia University physicist Peter Woit told the New York Times, 'but these days that doesn't much distinguish it from a lot of the rest of the literature.
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Bill Bryson |
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a26b897
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Exhausted by the stresses, Phillip was called home after four years, and retired to Bath. Apart from founding Sydney, he had one other notable achievement. In 1814, he managed to die by falling from a wheelchair and out of an upstairs window.
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Bill Bryson |
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bb0ef24
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Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil, whose experiences are wonderfully summarized by Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit--just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship. Undaunted, Le Gentil continued on to India to await th..
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Bill Bryson |
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df9d675
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Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil, whose experiences are wonderfully summarized by Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way . Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit (of Venus) from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit--just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship.
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humor
resilience
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Bill Bryson |
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463b5db
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Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O'Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux,
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Bill Bryson |
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375516b
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I now know that there is a happy abundance of science writers who pen the most lucid and thrilling prose--Timothy Ferris, Richard Fortey and Tim Flannery are three that jump out from a single station of the alphabet (and that's not even to mention the late but godlike Richard Feynman)--but,
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Bill Bryson |
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3c9395b
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In Australia and the Americas," says Tim Flannery, "the animals probably didn't know enough to run away."
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Bill Bryson |
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ae3694b
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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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dff9ef0
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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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b6b8040
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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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8c6b2fc
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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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ce37bc8
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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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b185097
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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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e4c0ad5
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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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973f591
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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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11993ea
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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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3c87ca0
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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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c08a13d
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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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56b0eaf
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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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6aa640e
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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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55a373e
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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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f46e750
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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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63eb6ca
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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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ad93f28
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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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8c93221
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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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197b077
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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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7033a60
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Language is more fashion than science
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language
linguistics
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Bill Bryson |
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20f3483
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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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7d6d408
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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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ba5d441
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Sumatra,
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Bill Bryson |
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9c243ca
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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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97170e9
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Trinil skullcap.
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Bill Bryson |
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d44ef18
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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 |