George Kranky, a small boy who lives on a farm with his mother, father and grandmother, is fed up of his Grandma's selfishness, grumpiness and her attitude towards him. George seeks to cure it by brewing a special medicine to cure her (made from every harmful product in the house, and several animal medicines from his father's shed), only to end up making his Grandma as tall as a house. While this does not improve her disposition, it does make her happier. George's father Mr. Killy Kranky (a farmer) and mother come home; when the father sees the giant hen (produced by the medicine given to the hen to prove to Grandma that the reason she is that huge is because of his medicine, although this attempt is failed), he is excited while the mother is first in shock and then starts to ignore the grandmother.
Over the years, cars have helped to define the experiences and self-perceptions of women in complex and sometimes unexpected ways. When women take the wheel, family structure and public space are reconfigured and re-gendered, creating a context for a literary tradition in which the car has served as a substitute for, an escape from, and an extension of the home, as well as a surrogate mother, a financial safeguard, and a means of self-expression.
Righting the Mother Tongue tells the cockamamie story of English spelling. When did ghost acquire its silent 'h'? Will cyberspace kill the one in rhubarb? And was it really rocket scientists who invented spell-check?
Seeking to untangle the twisted story of English spelling, David Wolman takes us on a wordly adventure from English battlefields to Google headquarters. Along the way, he pickets with spelling reformers outside the national spelling bee, visits the town in Belgium, not England, where the first English books were printed, and takes a road-trip with the boss at Merriam-Webster Inc. The journey is punctuated by spelling battles waged by the likes of Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie and the members of today's Simplified Spelling Society.
Rich with history, pop culture, curiosity and humor, Righting the Mother Tongue explores how English spelling came to be, traces efforts to mend the code and imagines the shape of tomorrow's words.
by Jill Murphy "The children were having breakfast..."
Mrs. Large determines to have just five minutes' peace from the mess and confusion of her beloved children. She fixes herself a tray, runs a tub of lovely warm water, fills it with bubble bath, and hopes for those precious moments alone before facing the day's activities. The "activities'' follow her to the bathroom, where, one by one, they present her with their special talents of playing the recorder, reading aloud, and dumping favorite toys from the toy box into the tub with her.
Who would have thought that a book about English would be so entertaining? Certainly not this grammar-allergic reviewer, but The Mother Tongue pulls it off admirably. Bill Bryson--a zealot--is the right man for the job. Who else could rhapsodize about "the colorless murmur of the schwa" with a straight face? It is his unflagging enthusiasm, seeping from between every sentence, that carries the book.
Bryson displays an encyclopedic knowledge of his topic, and this inevitably encourages a light tone; the more you know about a subject, the more absurd it becomes. No jokes are necessary, the facts do well enough by themselves, and Bryson supplies tens per page. As well as tossing off gems of fractured English (from a Japanese eraser: "This product will self-destruct in Mother Earth."), Bryson frequently takes time to compare the idiosyncratic tongue with other languages. Not only does this give a laugh (one word: Welsh), and always shed considerable light, it also makes the reader feel fortunate to speak English.
