Vive l'English!

In honor of April Fool's Day, I should make up a good story that misleads people into thinking it's true, but since that is pretty much what at least some people believe this blog does every day, it doesn't seem like a very creative idea.

So let's talk about the French, who are always grumbling about Americans, and about the English language taking over the world, by which the French mean France. They have put out a call for suggestions on replacing certain English words that are polluting the French language (some examples are Americans, great, are), and to top it off, this call has gone out to schoolchildren. The French figure that anything a six-year-old could come up with during recess HAS to be better than English.

Public employees in France will be required to use the new words. And what are some of the words that will be replaced? Buzz, talk, as in talk radio, and tuning, as in souping up one's car. I was a public employee for rather a long time, and my fellow public employees and I somehow never had the opportunity, on the job, to discuss souping up our cars. (This perhaps explains why so many of us left the public sector, but that is a different story.) But maybe these conversations come up more often among the French.

We might be tempted to retaliate and replace all the words in English that come from French, but since about 60% of our words have some French roots, we might find ourselves drastically reduced in communication tools. We could be deep in conversation, hammering home a certain point, when all of a sudden the word we were going to use is gone, and we start desperately motioning and drawing little pictures to try to fill in the gap. Pictionary would suddenly become not a game, but an essential communication tool used by children and CEOs alike.

This making up of words is of course not new. Some centuries ago, keepers of the language declared English to be an imperfect language and thus made up new English words based on the more perfect Latin. Joe is not surprised, as he thinks ALL of the English language is made up, at random, with no regard whatsoever to any logic. And it was probably done by the French.