A Fish in the Wind

I woke up late this morning, on a Friday that I thought was a Saturday, to rain. Talk about hitting a trifecta. And yet, on the bus to work, where I did get a seat it has be said - albeit a sideways one that has the potential to induce nausea when combined with reading - I managed a giggle. Here's why:

I am currently reading Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue, subtitled english and how it got that way, and on page ninety of my edition, he comes out with this gem explaining how humans manage to speak so quickly.

"In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx - or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it - and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances."

A freshly landed fish? Minor atmospheric disturbances? Brilliant. I last read Bryson a few years back when I picked up A Short History of Nearly Everything, and I had forgotten how much I enjoy his intelligent, conversational way of writing. And he is just so funny, in a subtle, creeps up on you and tickles your ribs kind of way. With A Short History... my poor colleagues had to put up with me incessantly looking up from my book with a gasp of "did you know...?" and "...fits on the head of a pin! Well I'll be." I don't know that nuggets of information about the English language are as likely to get me interrupting the determined Facebooking of my colleagues as say that pin thing...

"Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this i can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them."

But, it is likely that you, the reader, is going to have to read rather a few more. Standby.