by Garrison Frost

Now that the country's immigrants have taken to the streets, a good number of the rest of our population has begun its seasonal hand-wringing over the loss of our national identity. Nowhere is this seen more than in the sudden resurgence in calls to solidify English as the national language. Indeed, from all the panicked calls for new English-only laws, you would think that English is the new Latin. We criticize the French for being petty about their language, and yet we are coming close to surpassing their panic over anything that seems to threaten the Mother Tongue. Sure, the May 1 demonstrations prompted a lot of this, and the Spanish version of the National Anthem clearly got under a lot of people's skins. But the English-only folks were going full speed long before these recent events. Just recently in Hawthorne, one city councilwoman promoted a new law to force all businesses to have signs in English. Her reason: it just bothered her to see all those signs that she couldn't read. Who knows what those people were saying.

But if we're going to go all English all the time, why stop there? Why just speak normal modern English that is often so tainted by foreigness? If we're so desperate to have a language that is closely identified with our national identity, why not force people to use the English that was spoken and written by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of our forefathers? If patriotism is our goal, let's go back to the time when American patriots walked the walk and talked the talk. And why shouldn't we talk just like they did.

It would take some work, sure. We would have to get used to all that random capitalization and sentences that go on forever. And instead of our books having titles like "The Da Vinci Code," we'd have stuff like "A Fiction Involving the Great Master Artist Leonardo Da Vinci and His Code That Would Seem Unbreakable; or, To Solve an Unsolvable Riddle Left Over Hundreds of Years in Past With Exciting Results for All Who Attempt a Resolution."

And we will have to become more comfortable with apostrophes as well. We'll need them to shorten words that aren't unnecessarily long to begin with, as in "stocking'd" and "flower'd." We will also need those apostrophes to turn two-syllable words into one-syllable words, as in "o'er" and "ev'rywhere."

There will also be some new words. Instead of "you" we'll have to say "thou" or "thee," and have to figure out the difference between the two. "Wouldst" will be a big new word for us, as will be "Shalt."

And of course we'll have to ditch the use of the letter s in favor of that funny looking f. Speaking of "and," we're going to replace a lot of those with ampersands.

It won't be easy to change our whole way of doing things to speak Eighteenth Century English, but we can do it if we put our minds to it. We are Americans, after all. If John Adams could do it, so can we.

Maybe as soon as we get the whole language thing figured out, we can start dressing like our forefathers, too. OK, maybe not.

(May 4, 2006)

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