KEEP OUR LANGUAGE PURE. READ MORE BEOWULF



I feel sorry for our legislators. No sooner have they managed to protect us from rampaging flag burners, married gays and fanatic atheists, when another Armageddon cries out for their attention. And these are not minor issues they have to deal with; I am not talking here about drug addiction or the homeless. I am talking about the purity of the English language.

A week ago I read in the paper that our legislators are considering declaring English the official language of the state. Backers of the proposal say there is a need for cultural stability. Wow! -- I had no idea the situation was that serious. But then I always seem to run behind the facts. Take for instance the issue of gay marriage recognition. Until our leaders pointed it out, it never dawned on me that gay people from all over the US would get married in Hawaii and then descend upon Iowa. We could have been overrun! When will I ever learn; it's my liberal education that trips me up every time, I figure.

Anyway, I started thinking about the issue of language purity, and I have come to the conclusion that our legislators are right to be concerned. At first I wasn't too worried. I mean, sure, some non- English words have crept into the language like "nada," "kaput" and, in intellectual circles, even words such as "Zeitgeist" and " fruits de mer," but what harm can they possibly do? And then I read some statistics and found out how wrong I was. You begin with allowing "nada" and in fifty years half our words are Spanish, it turns out!

Here are the statistics: of the 450,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary only 4,500 are Anglo-Saxon. Which explains why nobody, but nobody, reads Beowulf anymore. I have tried reading it myself, because I like horror stories, but it's hopeless. Who understands things like "pone yldestan oret mecgas Beowulf..." nowadays? It's shameful to think that we have forgotten our own language.

So what do we learn from this? We learn that once you let in "nada" and "salsa," our great- grandchildren won't be able to read the Constitution anymore, it'll be all gobbledygook to them. And we also learn to support our wise legislators who are fighting to keep our culture pure. We have already lost Beowulf, Chaucer is tottering, what next?

So let's all do our bit to help. I for one promise not to use French expressions like "Eau de Cologne" ever again. And no more polysyllabic, Latinate words like "legislator" for me, thank you very much. I'll use an Anglo-Saxon word, say, "churl" which is shorter and more to the point. Beowulf would have liked that.

At Random - Adrian Korpel