Back in 2006, Hugh offered a series of comments on English as the National Language, that all started here . . .

In Defense of English Part I

Re the Hillary Spiel, perhaps it is merely my own Weltschmerz that I can have no Schadenfreude at the latest Sturm und Drang surrounding the ongoing Götterdämmerung at the Times. The demise of the Corporate Media will not be the result of an existential Angst or a change in the Zeitgeist, as many believe. It is their whole Gestalt, a failure in their Weltanschauung, gone is the gemütlich Gemeinschaft of the Sunday crossword puzzle, replaced by the sterile Liebestod of the impersonal Geschellschaft. Let’s face it. They are kaput. They just don’t know it yet.

By the way and somewhat OT but did I say what a big supporter I am of English as a national language?

OT in my ongoing defense of English as the national language Part II:

First off, I don’t want you to think I’m some mujik talking mat, a khren spouting govno. That said, I believe for clarity’s sake blogs should only use English for they have an important role as the new samizdat. They are the means by which we can combat the boyars of beltway borsch and the apparatchiks of the Bush agitprop, i.e. the Judy Millers and Tim Russerts, the Roves and the Mehlmans. After all, these are not an intelligentsia with ideas but, like their bosses, a nomenklatura with connections. It is precisely these connections which blogs are so effective at uncovering just like a matryoshka until the truth comes out. They are our spetsnaz fighting against the corporate media and the comfortable kulaks of the right. I am sick of the ideological, nonsensical pogroms mounted by these babushkas of babble. We are not lishenets yet. Guantanamo is a katorga but our country can still be saved from the fullblown gulag though Cheney like some evil Ded Moroz makes his lists and watches.

Part three:

First off, I don’t want you to think I’m some mujik talking mat, a khren spouting govno. That said, I believe for clarity’s sake blogs should only use English for they have an important role as the new samizdat. They are the means by which we can combat the boyars of beltway borsch and the apparatchiks of the Bush agitprop, i.e. the Judy Millers and Tim Russerts, the Roves and the Mehlmans. After all, these are not an intelligentsia with ideas but, like their bosses, a nomenklatura with connections. It is precisely these connections which blogs are so effective at uncovering just like a matryoshka until the truth comes out. They are our spetsnaz fighting against the corporate media and the comfortable kulaks of the right. I am sick of the ideological, nonsensical pogroms mounted by these babushkas of babble. We are not lishenets yet. Guantanamo is a katorga but our country can still be saved from the fullblown gulag though Cheney like some evil Ded Moroz makes his lists and watches.

More to follow . . .

More from Hugh . . .
Part four:

There are some who think I have a hidden agenda or ulterior motive here in defending English as the new national lingua franca and that, ipso facto, I must lack gravitas or be some kind of ignoramus or retrograde linguistic agitator, etc. I find this ad hoc if not ad hominem. While I agree that the onus is on me to present something more than a pro forma assertion that English is the nec plus ultra of languages and the sine qua non of a cohesive American society, do not expect a mea culpa from me.

First, a few caveats: caveat lector (applicable here), caveat emptor (always a good idea), and cave canem (ditto). That said, English is the de facto national language of our country. Its importance is sui generis. I think we can all agree on this although de gustibus non disputandum. De jure recognition of English would, mirabile dictu, change nothing. It would simply wrap our language in the flag and amor patriae. Some say it would be racist. O tempora! O mores! It is the vox populi. It is the modus operandi that makes our modus vivendi possible. It is not a quid pro quo. OK, well maybe it is but that’s not my point. It’s not a casus belli. It’s more sic semper tyrannis. Remember we live not in a pro bono society but a cui bono one.

I could go on ad nauseam but I think my ignotum per ignotius argument speaks for itself. English is our national language because it is our national language and can alone express what so many other languages cannot. QED.

Part five:

In defense of English as a national language Part V

We are one nation from the Rio Grande to Montana, from Florida to Los Angeles and San Francisco. As one who is an aficionado of English, I say it is this language that binds us and our nation together. English is too important to become a political piñata. It has helped make us Número Uno in the world. We should keep it and although there is little chance of us losing it, if we did lose it, we could lose the whole enchilada and that would be plain loco. However unlikely, we could be left pronto with zero, zip, nada and that would be muy malo for us all.

Understand those who support English as the national language are not waging a guerilla war on some but are making a sincere effort to create a unifying and unitary ambiente simpático for us all. Nor is it an act of machismo by the current jefe and his junta. Indeed Bush’s pregnant pauses are the very opposite of this. They bespeak a man embarazado and that is an embarrassing state of affairs indeed. No, amigos, compañeros, English as a national language is an act of faith, an auto de fe, as it were, of our rights. Let us not say hasta la vista, baby to an idea whose time has come. Let us embrace our inner pendejo and have the cojones to bid adiós to our doubts. To those who ask in the plaza of public opinion, ¿Qué pasa? here, let our answer and our language be clear: ¡Que será será!

Only two more . . .

Last two from Hugh . . .

Part VI:

Part VI

This is addressed to the ordinary Americans among us, to all you schlemiels and schlimazels, nebbishes, nudniks, klutzes, putzes, schlubs, schmos, as well as schmucks, nogoodniks, and momzers, and I might add any golems, and dybbuks that happen to be lurking out there in the crowd.

Just wanted to say that like you, I get mamish sentimental when I think about English and its place in our society. To tell the truth, it makes me so verklempt I’m fit to plotz. That’s why this whole schmeer gets me so broiges when I hear these mavens and luftmenschen kvetching about it as our national language. What chutzpah! These schmegeges can schlep their schlock about the cultural and linguistic diversity of our country and of English itself but I for one am not buying their shtick. It’s all so much dreck as far as I’m concerned. I exhort you all to be Mensches about this and stand up to their fardrayt arguments and meshugganah farschtrunken assertions. It wouldn’t be kosher to do anything else. Remember when all is said and done we have English and they have bubkes.

Note: My spelling is good patriotic American spelling. Yours may vary.

Part VII:

in defense of English as a national language Part VII and last

Our language like our borders is in crisis. Its autochthonic ethos is threatened by the paradox of a heterodox dogma of inclusion. This embrace of linguistic schizophrenia must be anathema to all those who love the orthogonal logic of our native idiom. We must shed our dystopic entropic psychology of cataleptic catatonia with its apathetic anergy of cultural polymorphism. Polyglot iconoclasts under the aegis of heterogeneity and with a nostalgia for the exotic are making a hecatomb of our language. They accuse us of seeking our therapeutic in a sophistic xenophobia. Alas, this is not some paranoid phantasm. We stand at the edge of the abyss on the horns of a dilemma surrounded on all sides by catastrophe, cataclysm, holocaust, and a full tetrahippal apocalypse. In such a toxic atmosphere, we, the hoi polloi, must be the catalyst of a cathartic apologia leading to the agathic agape of a pragmatic paradigm of an English only hegemony.

WTF? I just learned a few weeks ago when reading a linguistics-oriented explanation of cognitive processing that good old ‘fuck’ isn’t Saxon or Anglo-Saxon as it justly should be, but instead is Norwegian. WTF!

One can imagine the horror that the Roman Elite felt as their language picked up the local language color and was mangled into whole families of different languages. Similarly, the Brits!

Well, mates, time to throw somethin on the barbe.

Parting thought: there is no totalitarian regime (including the French Fifth Republic!) that can keep their language pure enough from foreign invasion for the wingnuts of any particular era. I kinda like that.

Hasta le vista!

“Well, mates, time to throw somethin on the barbe. “

Fair suck of the sav son, that’s a little unconvincing.