English-only white guys can't spell (or make sense)

On Saturday, Pat Buchanan hosted a conference to discuss how Republicans can regain a majority in America. During one discussion, panelists suggested supporting English-only initiatives as a prime way of attracting "working class white Democrats." The discussion ridiculed Judge Sotomayor for the fact that she studied children's classics to improve her grammar while attending college. The panelists also suggested that, without English as the official language, President Obama would force Americans to speak Spanish.

One salient feature of the event was the banner hanging over the English-only advocates. The word conference was spelled "Conferenece."

Aside from the humor of their error and the horror of their openly expressed desire to appeal to voters based on race, there's another part of this story.  That is:  What is English and what is not?

If we're going to go "English only" we're not going to have much left to say.  English gets at least half of its common words from non-Anglo-Saxon stock, and I don't want to give up half my vocabulary (it's jes fair-ta-middlin anywho). 'Sides, I don't know which half I have to drop down the ol' Wisconsin two-holer.

"Shampoo" comes from India, "chaparral" from the Basques, "ketchup" from China, "potato" from Haiti, "sofa" from Arabia, "boondocks" from the Tagalog language of the Philippines, "poppycock" from Dutch (it means "soft dung"), "chowder" from French and "bankrupt" from Italian. Even our beloved dollar derives its name from the name of a German silver mine, donchaknow hey.

We borrowed more than 500 words from the Spanish settlers of this hemisphere, many of which were adopted from Amerindian languages, and many of which were Mexican inventions. These, I presume, will all be outlawed.

And what about words that we borrowed from other languages and have since been abandoned by their languages of origin? The French no longer use nom deplume, double entendre, panache, bon viveur or RSVP (repondez s'il vous plait). Does that mean these words are now ours? Finders keepers, losers weepers?

There will be a couple-two-tree places in need of re-naming. Detroit, Los Angeles, Des Moines, Charlotte, St. Louis, San Francisco, Louisville, San Diego, Baton Rouge, Miami, Dallas, Boise, and Milwaukee (among many others) will all have to give up their non-English names.

Then there are those nouns in need of new adjectival forms, because the forms now in use are not English: town and urban, sun and solar, water and aquatic, house and domestic, moon and lunar, mouth and oral, eyes and ocular, fingers and digital, and, of course, book and literary.

Some words aren't English, but didn't come to us from other languages. They're accidents. We hear words wrong, then use them wrong. "Cater corner'' was misheard so that it is becoming "catty-corner," and then made cute by "kitty-corner." "Sparrow-grass'' was misheard as "asparagus." "Buttonhold" was misheard as "buttonhole." English or not?

Pea, cherry, grovel, sidle, greed, beg and difficult are all accidents of bad grammar, created by false analogy or back-formation. Pease (as in "pease porridge hot") and cherries were mistakenly thought to signify plurals, and we back-formed errant singular forms. Criminey.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are at least 350 words in English that owe their existence to typographical errors or other misrenderings. What about these accidents? Official language or not?

And when we say we want "English," whose English do we mean? British English or American English? Being older, isn't the British version more "really" English? And if we go with American English, which version do we use? Is it a drinking fountain or a bubbler? Is it soda or is it pop? Is "regular" coffee white, as in Boston and New York, or black, as in everywhere else? Are you a "torist" on a "tore" as in California, or a "tourist" on a "tour" as in the other 49 states? Americans have 79 names for dragon flies, 130 for oak trees and 176 for the dust balls under the bed. (Of course, some words deserve to die, such as the medical term that begins "methianylglutaminyl" and finishes 1,913 letters later as "alynalalanylthreonilarginylserase." She's a humdinger, you betcha.)

And if we can decide our official language is American English from Wisconsin (uff dah to dat), is it today's language or our language from 50 years ago? Or 100? (In Shakespeare's time, our most offensive four-letter word for copulation described what farmers did to fields with a plow.) And what about tomorrow's language? It'll be different from what we speak today, aina-hey? Will there be a panel set up to decide which words are English and which are not?

If there is one thing that is truly multicultural about our culture, one aspect of our lives that is a valid melting pot, it's our language. And because language is not static, but a living, evolving, adapting organism, the melting continues today, as it will tomorrow and the day after.  On average, 98 new "English" are created every day (it may have reached the million-word mark about 13 days ago), which is to say it's something you simply can't nail down.

Perhaps the politicians can save us. Perhaps they could form a caucus and come up with a slogan to help us know which words to use and which to avoid. Of course, they couldn't tell us about it, because "caucus" is an Algonquin Indian word and "slogan" is Gaelic. And that just wouldn't be English.

C'meer once with that English jabber. Ya born in a barn? Halt's maul!

Post script:  Although it isn't mentioned in the linked-to story, these English only white nationalists often blow a gasket over our national anthem being sung in Spanish.  They always mistakenly think that this is a recent phenomenon brought on by modern multi-culturalism, and the often ask (rhetorically, they think) whether it's been translated into the languages of other immigrants, the implication being that we're somehow coddling Spanish-speaking immigrants.

The Star Spangled Banner was translated into Spanish 90 years ago.  It was translated into Yiddish 66 years ago, and into German 148 years ago!  And it has been translated into many other languages. My parents-in-law had an album put out in the early 1940's (by Armed Forces Radio, as I recall) that included the anthem sung in Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and German.  The album cover noted that other languages that were available, including a variety of Native American languages. Back then, we knew what   translating the national anthem into the immigrant's language actually helps speed assimilation.