Good English and Bad

Hi,

For my third post I would like to discuss about a text that I read recently and that is "Good English and Bad" by Bill Bryson. Let's start by asking ourselves what does this title tell us about the text? Is it going to be one of the "this is what you do wrong and this is how you should be doing it" type of texts? or maybe the "some individuals speak English better than others?" type? Well, the answer to both of these is no. This text is about English language, about rules that are created by grammarians and that when possible, are simply ignored because of the overcomplicated words that are created. I think that overall, the author of the text is trying to send a message about the standards of usage and that is that sometimes the rules which are imposed can have no actual reason and here is where the author is using also irony saying that the reason why the word hopefully is not allowed to be used in an absolute value is because "somebody at 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 (...) because he had been told so by his uncle (...) and so on". I feel like the author is somehow criticizing a bit the mentioned standards by mentioning some "pieces of advice" which after less than a century became "immutable rules". The example that the author is giving in this case is the rule according to which you should not end a sentence with a preposition. The text contains many more examples regarding rules of English and the way English has changed after it started following the "grammatical percepts" of Latin, "a language that died a thousand years ago". Overall, this discussion made me reflect over my lapses and made me realize that English is a complex language which is far from being easy. By reading, I found also some rules that I haven't heard of before and I am happy that I had the opportunity to learn something new since this is the first step into improving my language and this way removing the previously mentioned lapses.