Although a professor, Bryson has not written this book in an academic manner, with his humorous style and just like telling a story instead. I still remember him describing Cai Lun as a person without two balls who improved the method of making paper. A respectable and great inventor in Chinese history has, in his words, become a disabled and despised poor guy. Anyway, Cai really has no balls.

What is covered in book is the history of English, some language phenomena, and so on. A linguistic monograph tends to be rather boring and too difficult while this work of Bryson’s has overcome this problem by giving plenty of examples and by avoiding citations. At the first look, you will not have the least idea that you are reading an academic work. And you are not indeed.

If you are a green hand in linguistics and want to get a basic idea of what it is all about, then you are advised to first look through this book. Once you have finished the reading, you will know what is acrostic, word square, anagram, aphesis, apocope, aposiopesis, aspirate, cedilla, clerihew, clipped, cryptogram, dactylic, declension, elision, guttural, heteronym, Holorime, isogloss, lipogram, monoglot, onomastics, palindrome, paronomasia, pejorative words, preterite, Properispomenon, rebus, schwa, indeterminate vowel, scrabble, spelling bee, syncope, umlaut, etc.