Speaking of the Language : Books: The author of ‘The Mother Tongue’ says the U.S. shouldn’t mince words in dealing with Iraq. He applauds President Bush’s use of the ‘H’ word: <i> Hostages</i> .

As the Persian Gulf crisis escalated, Bill Bryson didn’t have much chance to keep up with the news.

But the traveling author and expert on English usage did notice one thing as he bounced through airports, checked into hotels and waited to be interviewed at radio stations. Namely, the initial reluctance of the U. S. government to label its citizens trapped in Iraq and Kuwait as hostages.

For Bryson, who freely admits he is no expert on the nuances of diplomatic speaking, it was another example of “mincing words in a way that isn’t necessary.” So, when President Bush finally used the “H” word in a speech earlier this week, Bryson saw it as a welcome meshing of language with reality. He applied the same reasoning to the quibbling over whether the cutoff of supplies to Iraq was or was not a blockade.

“That’s precisely what they are doing,” he said. “The Iraqis are holding hostages and the United States responded with a blockade.”

Bryson also noted that diplomatic niceties weren’t observed when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Bush described each other. Each head of state chose the same epithet, liar , to describe his enemy.

To the Iowa-born writer who has lived in Great Britain for the last 15 years, the crossed words over the Middle East are only the latest go-round in a long scrutiny of the English language. Even before he ever thought of writing “The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way,” Bryson, 38, admits to being a “random” collector of tidbits about the language.

With the publication of “The Mother Tongue,” Bryson demonstrates that he has concentrated this previously unfocused penchant into a potential career. The book is a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, a latter-day Eldorado for writers and publishers. Moreover, the book has been widely and favorably reviewed by critics charmed by Bryson’s mixing of voluminous research with a humorous, anecdotal style.

For instance, the book opens with the dry comment, “More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.”

In the next paragraph, Bryson quotes an announcement found in a hotel in Yugoslavia: “The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway.” Then he cites a pseudo-English warning to drivers in Tokyo: “When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor.”

Much further along--toward the end of the book, in fact--Bryson’s chapter on swearing notes that in the 19th Century, an “outburst of prudery . . . swept through the world like a fever.” In its wake, Victorians desperately fell to using anatomical euphemisms: stomach for belly; drumstick, first joint and white meat for the leg, thigh and breast of a chicken. Perhaps most extremely, bulls were called “gentlemen cows.”

While these examples may lack the sweep and majesty of the English language in the hands of a Churchill or Shakespeare, they fit the criteria laid down by Bryson for inclusion in his book:

“Did it actually tell you something useful about the language or was it entertaining,” he explains. “That was my whole idea, to share the delight and fascination with English that I have.”

Indeed, Bryson’s book is as full of factoids as a clear-cut forest is full of stumps. For instance, he reports that in his plays and poems, Shakespeare used 17,677 words, “of which at least one-tenth had never been used before.” His list of Shakespeare’s word inventions includes leapfrog, monumental, castigate, hurry, pedant and obscene .

While Bryson said he has no pretense of changing or enlarging the language, he admitted that writing the book made him something of a language liberal.

“I have become less convinced that we have to be really strict in our usage of the language,” he said. “For instance, one reviewer criticized me because I asked in the book ‘who by and who for.’ She pointed out it should be ‘whom by and whom for.’ I was aware that was the correct way it should be, but it seemed to me to write it ‘whom by and whom for’ would be incredibly pretentious and pompous.”

Such critics, he asserted, “fail sometimes to recognize that one of the glories of the English language is that it does grow and evolve and expand, and that it has this enormous flexibility.”

He added: “More and more I’m moving to the view that people are too fussy about the language. They think that proper English usage is a matter of learning a whole set of rules and blindly and arbitrarily following them. I think it’s a lot more subtle than that.”

Having said that, however, Bryson cautioned that he is not a radical who can tolerate slipshod use of his mother tongue. “I think there’s a great case for precision in the language, and we should respect distinctions between words, between imply and infer and flout and flaunt .”

Moreover, Bryson maintained that his book is largely a work of reporting, not an opinionated essay. “There are not a whole lot of my own views in there,” he said.

The tedium of objective research sometimes made Bryson slightly crazy. “Sometimes it felt like I was doing 20 college term papers all at once. It was homework,” he says.

Evidence of the latter is right there in the back of the book, a select bibliography of more than 100 books on English, ranging from various dictionaries and histories of the language to “Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society” and “A Dictionary of International Slurs.”

And it was homework in a literal sense for Bryson, who used to work for London newspapers but is now a free-lancer. He lives 250 miles from London and half an hour from “the nearest town with shops,” he says. “By British standards, that’s incredibly remote.”

Yet his isolation carries its own lesson about the huge variations--and fierce parochialisms--of the English language.

“I live in this little dale in Yorkshire, a valley that’s five miles long, and people swear they can tell that you were born up the dale or down the dale by the way you speak,” he says.

Bryson himself has undergone an audible change since he moved to Britain in the mid-1970s. Although a native of the Midwest, his voice now hails from the United Kingdom.

When his accent is pointed out, he shrugs it off. “I know,” he says with a hint of resignation. “It’s been pointed out to me over and over again. The funny thing is, I resisted as consciously as I could giving up my American accent. I still pronounce words exactly as I did when I left home. I still say bath and banana and tomato (the way Americans do), and I don’t say TEWsday , I say Tuesday .”

He adds: “I think the problem is that living over there for a long time, your cadence and your rhythms (of speech) all change.”