By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Official
I can’t tell you how pleased I am that President Donald Trump has named English America’s official language. Now politicians may actually speak it. Trouble is, there’s a flip side.
To start, so long to “Saugatuck” and “Michigan” whose names come from Native American terms that are far less American than English.
Adios also to armadillo, avocado, bodega, bonanza, bronco, cannibal, Caribbean (to be renamed “Sea of America” next to its neighbor Gulf), cojones, cockroach, coyote, hoosegow, hurricane, lasso, Ted Lasso, loco, macho, marijuana, oregano, piña colada, politico, renegade, rodeo, tango, tequila, tobacco, Zorro … all of Hispanic origin.
Sayonara to anime, bonsai, haiku, kabuki, karaoke, kimono, origami, sumo, tofu, satori, sudoku, tsunami and zen unless Japan agrees to pay tariffs too.
Arrivaderci America (named after Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci), bimbo, bordello, buffoon, dildo, dilettante, doge (a chief magistrate of Venice or Genoa), fascist, imbroglio, martini, paparazzi, pizza, Ponzi scheme, portico, tutti frutti, zebra … all the way to zero.
There are Yiddish words I’ll miss too: chutzpah, drek, klutz, kvetch, nudnik, putz, schlemiel, schlock, schlub, schmuck, schnook … insults won’t be the same.
Now Latin really will be a dead language since we’ve banished absent, barbarian, civic, clamor, conflict, decapitate, decay, delete, deport, dictate, doctrine, document, donate, doubt, emperor, error, expire, fame, fierce, grateful, gravity, gusto, habitat, hostile, imperial, insidious, justice, liberal, malevolent, me, mediocre, military, negotiate, oppress, people, petulant, problem, punishment, rational, regulate, respect and ridicule, sacred, savage, science, secret, service, sinister, temptation, tenure, tyrant, ultimate, value, venom, virile, vivid … but why stop there?
We’ve never quite trusted France. Remember when we renamed French fries “Freedom fries” after they didn’t back us invading Iraq even though we’d proven Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction?
That didn’t last long, but for now au revoir to mayor, prayer, council, government, army, battalion, soldier, budget, commerce, money, capitalism, nationalism, chauvinism, federal, bureaucracy, constitution, diplomacy, photography and surrealism.
What will we do without the three German B’s — Bach, Beethoven, Budweiser — not to mention lager, pilsener, steins and other Oktoberfest necessities? Absent terms like angst, sturm and drang, schadenfreude, weltchmerz and zeitgeist? Dummkopfs, kitsch and kaput will all be verboten too.
English, say linguists, emerged from Germanic dialects spoken by Angles, Saxons and Jutes who migrated to Britain in the 5th century AD. It’s important we report, then deport such immigrants today before they take over our tongues as well.
I’m not so sure about Brits now either. Didn’t they defend Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy (A word to the wise; all those y’s sound foreign) after his tiff with Trump?
Perhaps switching to Russian would be better. Gulags, pogroms, agitprop, apparatchik, drink the Putin vodka. We’ll be better for it.
Some 80 percent of English words are loan words — not alone words but hybrids or adaptations from other languages. They do not dilute but enrich our ability to communicate. With all due respect to imposing a monoculture, it’s too late for that— the Tower of Babble’s already built.
Part of Trump’s idea — to undo a 2000 Clinton mandate requiring agencies and other federal funding recipients to provide extensive language assistance to non-English speakers — makes sense.
Say you just speak the Siyu dialect of Swahili in Susquehanna? Must schools supply you and peers separate tutors and translators? That gets costly and cumbersome quick.
Ever get instruction manuals written in 14 languages, each in 6-point print so they can fit all in fiite space but you can’t read one?
This takes care of that, I guess. But will that take care of this?
