Thursday, March 26, 2009

What Did You Say?

I'm into my first cup of coffee, ½ caffeine coffee as that was all I could find at a reasonable price. So it's the same as tea for caffeine content and I will have to wait to become caffeine free. That will happen when I can find a cheap and tasty caffeine free coffee. Until then, it's back and forth between this and tea. And with just a little bit of caffeine in me, my brain is primed and ready.

Now all I have to do is browse the internet for awhile and see what catches my imagination and makes me think. Yesterday I said that Petulant was going to be the Recycled Word For the Day and I can say that it applies to me this morning. I am mildly petulant and after I read the news I will be very petulant. So far, every other headline has the words 'kill' or 'killed' in them. That doesn't bode well for the day. Hmmm? Should 'bode' be another recycled word? Or should I use 'portend' instead? I believe so.

And my first bit of browsing brought me to an older Economist story about the English language and how it is growing and the fact that it will have one million words in it on or before April 29th of this year. That's just a little more than a month away, so I have to get busy on this recycled word thing or I'll never be able to stem the tide.

And all of that makes me think of our insistence that everyone speak English in this country. Which is insane. And which English should all speak, the first half million words or the last? Is there an acceptable level of English speaking? Maybe it's just 175,00 words; a number that can be easily memorized. Me, I like a polylingual nation. I enjoy hearing the various languages; they are music to my ears. See, there's another one…'polylingual'. It deserves to be recycled.

Link to the article

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