Speak American, Dam it!
At a very young age, I had a degree of success making something work despite some linguistic chaos. But no good deed goes unpunished. A day after I had a one won, a paddy wagon pulled up next to me on old Savannah Street, two coppers in blue jumped out and threw me in the back as disrespectfully as if I were a Stonewall rioter who poured a beer over a cop in 1969.
They dragged me into an interview room and chained me to the table. The room was hot, over 90 degrees. Two other cops came in and questioned me in the third degree. After bending my right-hand index finger back by 45 degrees, I confessed to every first degree felony committed in the United States for the last 90 years. One cop asked me if there was anything I could say for myself that would help me avoid the electric chair. I told them I had a philosophy degree. Stunned, they apologized and let me go.
This short story well illustrates why English is one of the hardest world languages to learn. How many meanings were there to “degree” that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with each other? And why is it spelled degree when everyone says it like degree? And why isn’t me, mee, or degree degre? Think about how many times spellcheck efs you up. Or dictation programs get it wrong. You have these computers that are much smarter than your average American and even they can’t do English good.
“And why is English so hard?” ewe may ask. Well, it is a cluster ef of many languages. Illiterate tribes settled England. Then Romans attacked and you had people speaking Roman. Then the Vikings attacked, and Danish was spoken outside the churches where they spoke pig Latin. Then the French conquered England in 1066 and made French the language of the land. No one liked the French and you had people mumbling about not speaking English - a language with no grammar rules or spelling rules and words coming from all over the world with different spellings. Finally, people stared to codify English but that was about 500 years long after other countries settled their language so everyone in France could read “Les Miserable,” could hum “The 1812 Overture,” could cook chicken cordon bleu, at a time in England when no one understood Chaucer much less Shakespeare. To make matters worse, in the mid-1700s or thereabouts, two English clowns decided that English was not complicated enough, and they invented grammar rules to make English even harder, the who and whom thing, or if me is me or I, or you cannot end a preposition with a sentence. No other language is such a hot mess.
Imagine the tragic confluence of circumstances where a depressingly high percentage of the most ignorant and arrogant people of the world are stuck with trying to speak the most difficult language of the world. Like, is that bad luck or what?
In this essay, we’ve already addressed at length why English is so difficult. For obvious reasons, we need not spend as much thyme addressing the fact that we are the most ignorant and arrogant assholes in the world. A higher percentage of us believe in ghosts than any people on earth. For two consecutive years, life expectancy in the United States has been coming down and that is in no small part due to ignorance and arrogance. I could go on, but this is both well-known and tiresome.
To end on a positive note, a good thing about English is that since the 1800s most of us can understand English no matter how badly we speek it or right it. The gift of working around linguistic chaos is native speakers learned to work round it at an early age. And for the ESL folks, you only need to learn it but so good and most people can figure out what your trying to commmunicate. That is wye all people get these blogs!