In Praise of Anarchy

Why is English the most widely spoken, richly worded language in the world? One reason is an open door.

According to the PBS series, The Story of English, our language has never stationed guard dogs at its gate. No equivalent of the French or Spanish academies has ever decided for us which words will or won't enter our vocabulary. Back when English-speaking people were being conquered by every greedy horde around, they were just as greedily plundering the languages of their invaders. Meanwhile, nobody was keeping tabs or making rules. Nouns could be verbs, verbs could be nouns. Forget gender endings. We soaked up pages of irregular verbs, played havoc with pronunciation, and entertained a constant flow of colorful, exotic idioms. In short, English borrowed from the best of every language it has ever encountered.

The result--over half-a-million every-day English words are now at our disposal. Plus just as many scientific and technical terms. The Germans have to get by with only 185 thousand, the French, a mere one hundred thousand, including English contributions such as, le weekend.

With all this in mind, how should we deal with, like, the latest invasion of new words? Know what I'm sayin'? Yo! Glasnost, gotta be the mondo way to go. Don't be so read-only, dude. Sabe? Hey, if that's Greek to you, man, how you gonna handle the next truly radical concept. Check it out.

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