English Quote by Bill Bryson

““Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s.””

Bill Bryson

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“But Welsh spellings are as nothing compared with Irish Gaelic, a language in which spelling and pronunciation give the impression of having been devised by separate committees, meeting in separate rooms, while implacably divided over some deep semantic issue. Try pronouncing geimhreadh, Gaelic for “winter,” and you will probably come up with something like “gem-reed-uh.” It is in fact “gyeeryee.”…

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If you go out on the Appalachian Trail, you have to bring so much more equipment - a tent, sleeping bag - but if…

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“The dining table was a plain board called by that name. It was hung on the wall when not in use, and was perched on the diners' knees when food was served. Over time, the word board came to signify not just the dining surface but the meal itself, which is where the board comes from in room and board.…

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“From almost nothing, France in four years built up an aircraft industry that employed nearly 200,000 people and produced some 70,000 planes. Britain built…

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“Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of…

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“A diarist named George Templeton Strong recorded in the winter of 1866 that even with two furnaces alight and all the fireplaces blazing, he…

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Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this…

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As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not…

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Nobody gets excited about the future at all, ever. The future is something we find depressing and worrisome.

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“What made this particularly interesting is that John Howard is by far the dullest man in Australia. Imagine a very committed funeral home director…

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More English quotes

English teachers tend to put more thought in the books than the author did

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Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say…

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Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.

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I'm not very good at standard English.

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I was brought up by the English side of my family, who are very repressed and working class. Absolutely lovely, but very English.

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No, I didn't forget Samoan - I understand it when you talk to me but, you know, to put phrases together I sound like…

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The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the…

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