Imperial English

I belong to a social bookmarking service called Stumbleupon and read a post on a fellow stumblers home page about Imperial English. He wrote something like he was worried about how Imperial English is becoming the second language of the world and is causing local languages to die out.

English is the best language for business, math, science, technology, medicine and a whole bunch of other things. Pilots and air traffic controllers speak english simply because it is the best language for aviation.

It is impossible to express many modern concepts in most languages. Can you imagine asking one of the most basic accounting questions, “Do you post your income and expenses to your general ledger on an accrual basis or a cash basis?” in the majority of the languages on earth? I’m sure it is impossible to explain the the difference between FIFO and LIFO accounting. Most English speaking people don’t even have the vocabulary or background to understand the question.

Another issue is the expense of publishing textbooks. It is much cheaper to teach students English and then buy textbooks written in English than to go through the very expensive process of writing the books in native languages (If it is even possible..) and then print the textbooks.

Go to www.worldwidewords.org and find the article about how many words there are in the English language. Depending on what you count as a distinct word, English might have as many as 2,000,000 words. No other language even comes close.

Let's have some fun. I am neither a mathematician nor a scientist, but we are having fun here. How about this description for a college course, "one of the things we will do during the course of our studies is to use statistics with calculus and trigonometric functions in the differential equations to calculate the probability of the instrumentation attached to the brand new Large Hadron Collider detecting an Higgs-boson particle." How many languages can you write that in 6? 5?

Another thing is that it is easy to import words from other languages into English. Henry Kissinger imported the French word detente, because the only way to express the concept in English is with the awkward phrase, a mutual relaxation of tensions.
In conclusion, it isn't any kind of imperialism that makes English the second language of the world. The reason is instead hard cold reality. English is the best language for most of the requirements of modern society.

In conclusion, it isn’t any kind of imperialism that makes English the second language of the world. The reason is instead hard cold reality. English is the best language for most of the requirements of modern society.

Where Bush went wrong.

What was the one big mistake President Bush made? I think it was to confuse the difference between how to act on a personal level and how to act on a national political level.

On a personal level it is enough just to do what is right; What is moral; What God expects from you. It says in the Bible, if a man strikes you turn the other cheek, that is supposed to apply only on a personal level. It does not apply on a national level. On a national level if another nation attacks you, you must fight back.

On a national level just doing what you think is right without consulting others will probably be interpreted as being haughty and arrogant. Politicians must listen to everyone and talk to everyone, that is where President Bush and Karl Rove made their mistake and lost both Houses of Congress. They decided they were doing the right thing and didn’t listen to anyone. They didn’t realize, therefore, that an unpopular war trumps all other issues.

President Washington visualized the different branches of government as working together. He pictured the President consulting with and working closely with both Houses of Congress. Bush didn’t, until he lost both Houses, then I saw him on television say that he was looking forward to working with the new majorities in the Houses of Congress.